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from the who-remembers-when-Windows-95-was-released? dept.
Windows 95 Easter egg discovered after being hidden for 25 years:
When developing software, it is not uncommon for developers to slip in a secret hidden feature, message, or even a mini-game, that users can discover by performing particular actions in a program.
[...] This week, a new Easter egg in Windows 95's Internet Mail program has been discovered by Windows hacker and developer Albacore, opening a secret window that displays a scrolling list of the developer's names.
Before this discovery, there is no known mention of this Easter egg, meaning it has remained undiscovered for close to 25 years.
[...] To access the Easter egg, users need to launch Internet Mail, click on Help, and then About. When the About screen opens, click on the listed comctl32.dll file, so it becomes highlighted, and then type MORTIMER on your keyboard.
After typing 'mortimer,' a small window will be displayed that will begin to list the Internet Mail developer's names, as shown in the video above that was shared with BleepingComputer.
See the linked story on Bleeping Computer for links to this Easter egg and another one for Windows 95 itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @03:05AM (6 children)
I read about these Easter eggs, and I've got to say, at no company that I worked at would we even think of throwing in some superfluous junk like that. How did it make it into Microsoft code? Was there no peer review, just people coding and committing? The company culture (back then, anyway) seems to not place a high value on clean code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @03:27AM (3 children)
You don't remember the flight simulator that was embedded in Excel back in the 90s?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @08:00PM (2 children)
I sure do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @08:42PM (1 child)
Ok -- how about: You sure aren't very fun are you? If all you're worried about is code passing a peer review, and in saying so, lacking the context and being cognizant that sometimes, people will try to claim credit for the work they do while also trying to lighten up a soulless corporate entity's soul crushing efforts like what you are proposing is done...
it doesnt take a swot analysis to recognize that you aren't in the opportunities quadrant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @09:39PM
We simply respect our customer's machine resources (RAM, CPU) to not waste them. Also, the less extraneous stuff you put in, especially with regard to user input, the more secure the code will be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @03:57AM (1 child)
As someone who used the first edition of Win95A, I can safely say that code review and product testing must have been non-existent. The machine hung on boot if you didn't move the mouse within 10 seconds of reaching the desktop and it would reliably crash within a few hours* even if you did nothing else. Plug'n'Play screwing up ESCD settings also meant swapping video cards** every second or third boot when the machine would hang during POST. That one looked like motherboard failure and still existed as late as XP SP2 when it was reliably triggered by the MSN and AOL installers. AFAIK it still hasn't been fixed.
*The timer bug that reliably crashed the machine after 24 hours uptime wasn't discovered until Win95B since that was the first edition that could run that long. Daily reboot due to memory leaks was still strongly recommended as late as WinME.
**Required installing a different brand of video card in order to boot into Safe Mode so the windows drivers could be reset. The machine could then be powered off and the cards safely swapped back before restarting in normal mode. This was the only way to fix bad ESCD settings in those days. Modern BIOSes erase ESCD any time CMOS is cleared as a workaround.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday March 30 2021, @09:15AM
So that's why I couldn't get it to boot reliably! I wish I'd known about this back then.
Back then I used to say that Windows 95 only had three problems: it wouldn't boot, it wouldn't run, and it wouldn't shut down. (I'd seen it crash during startup, running, and shutting down.)