[HN Gopher] Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an E... ___________________________________________________________________ Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in Windows 1.0 Author : rbanffy Score : 274 points Date : 2022-03-23 11:12 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.techradar.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.techradar.com) | echelon wrote: | > Perhaps the most notable name in the newly unveiled list is | Gabe Newell, now president at Valve - known for everything from | Half-Life to the Steam Deck. Newell worked at Microsoft from 1983 | to 1996, leaving to found Valve. | | That's new information for me! I had no idea Gabe worked for | Microsoft. Another billionaire founder/CEO to add to my list of | "first worked at FAANG/MANGA" (though this one does looks back | pretty far back). | | The FAANG/MANGA -> Startup pipeline is a good one. Learn all the | technical skills and the lay of the land in a great environment, | build strong connections, save up some cash, then leverage them | to succeed in your own interests. | toyg wrote: | Did you read _Microserfs_ and _JPod_ , by Douglas Coupland? The | reality of '80s/'90s Microsoft was a bit different from modern | FAANG. | TazeTSchnitzel wrote: | The cash is an important part. Valve isn't public and can do | what it wants! | bushbaba wrote: | It can also be happy with its existing marketshare. When a | public company the motto is grow or die. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | It's quite impressive they managed to make a profitable | business given that when they started, video game piracy was | such a big thing (at least in my recollection); Valve / Steam | did for PC video game piracy what Spotify did for music | piracy and streaming services did for movie / TV show piracy. | gigaflop wrote: | Piracy can often be discouraged by making the legitimate | options more accessible. Steam served as a unified | storefront for multiple titles, and made it easy to manage | a library of content without flipping through a binder of | CDs, a notebook page full of CD keys, and a box full of the | manuals they came with. | | Why worry about downloading multiple chunks of an archive | and reassembling them, or having your ISP throttle you for | torrenting, or trusting the crackers of the content you're | pirating when you can just wait for the game to go on sale? | | I'll say, though. Elden Ring didn't work for me at launch, | and I ended up refunding it(thanks, digital refund | process!), but I seriously considered getting a pirated | copy to see if the cracked version would work better. | Anecdotal reports suggested that the anticheat (which was | cracked in the pirated version) was the cause of issues for | plenty of people. | mywittyname wrote: | Valve has a netflix-like model early on. I remember that | you'd buy boxed Valve software and it would come several | license keys, one for the base game, then another for the | expansion, etc. You could give these keys away to friends | to play online with. Free CD keys from my friend's dad was | what allowed me to get into PC gaming. | gigaflop wrote: | How early was this? My intro to Steam was via the Orange | Box, which I bought from a physical store. I don't | remember if Steam was mandatory for them. | | Either way, CD keys used to be totally shareable, before | online DRM really kicked off. You could just copy the one | you got, and let someone else use it to install the game. | | A downside I faced was when my CD for a game stopped | working, and I had to buy the game all over again to get | a new CD + key. Either key would work during the install, | but I didn't have the option of just downloading the | installation media, so I had to pay up. | | The other time I saw this backfire was in a (temporary) | LAN setting with COD4:MW. There were only so many CD | keys, and you wouldn't be able to join a game where | 'your' key was already active. Otherwise, it was fully- | featured and fully usable! | pvg wrote: | Fairly sure Steam was mandatory for Orange Box and was | also probably the first (or thereabouts) time Steam did | the key sharing thing - getting the Orange Box bundle | would give you extra keys for the bits you already owned. | This model isn't really how the bulk of bundles sold on | Steam work now, though, for whatever reason - bundles | tend to just get steep discounts on sale with possible | extra discounts for content you already have. | AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: | Your recollection matches mine. I recall much discussion of | how PC gaming was dying and being replaced by consoles in | large part due to piracy. | | Valve did it so much better than the streaming services | though. There are remarkably few games I can't get from | Steam, but I need half a dozen TV streaming services to get | decent show coverage. | | Gabe took to heart what media companies refuse to believe: | that piracy is a _service_ problem. Make the legitimate | service better and more convenient than piracy and it | practically goes away overnight. | echelon wrote: | > Valve did it so much better than the streaming services | though. There are remarkably few games I can't get from | Steam, but I need half a dozen TV streaming services to | get decent show coverage. | | Valve has a lot of amazing things going for it: a major | social component, game save backups, achievements, deep | libraries of purchased content. These make the platform | sticky in a marketplace with lots of alternatives. They | are also smart enough to recognize Microsoft trying to | choke them and they've made investments in platforms that | will ensure their continued success: SteamOS, Steam | Deck... | | Valve also caters to the developers: easy networking, | easy distribution. Lots of code you don't have to write | or support. | | While Netflix isn't suffering, they certainly wish they | had these sorts of advantages going for them. | | Netflix didn't build a monopoly on the content and | franchises that legacy media companies then used to | bootstrap their own competing services. After this | licensing weakness became obvious, other tech companies | started to encroach on the market too. | | Netflix saw a way to survive the drying up of their | licenses in making their own original content. | Unfortunately, it's a slow and expensive process to | produce media, with no guarantees of success for any | given title. And it's not something that only Netflix can | do, either. Anybody with money can produce content. | | Netflix should have offered the ability to buy titles | early on and run deep discounts on what they saw were | subscription drivers. It might have cannibalized their | subscription revenue and resulted in some subscribers | churning, but they wouldn't be churning to other | services. You'd be surprised by the number of people that | subscribe to Netflix and just want to watch The Office or | Parks and Rec. They could have perpetually kept these | folks on the platform. | | Netflix should have also built a ratings, review, | library, and social component that kept viewers involved | in the platform. Something not portable. | | Going forward, Netflix should build tools to let content | producers run faster when making content for Netflix (run | a lot of operations, provide ADs, personnel, studio | space, etc.) The rest of the industry is consolidating, | and they need to get in on this. | | Netflix also needs to get ahead of the game on new tech. | Automated means to change product placements dynamically | to earn even more revenue on long tail content | (re)watching, etc. | | Ultimately, I think film and television media is going to | be disrupted by new forms of content that are orders of | magnitude faster to produce, orders of magnitude cheaper, | and satisfies the entire long tail of interests. If a | company can get in and build a marketplace that caters to | both producers and consumers, and establishes a deep | moat, it will be the Valve or YouTube of future long form | content. | gigaflop wrote: | Steam has reaped the rewards of the first-mover | advantage, but I feel like they deserves a bit of respect | for it, since the problems they were solving were still | 'new', and solutions allowed people to actually do new | things/have a better experience, instead of sitting back | and extracting rent. SteamOS is something I'm going to be | incredibly thankful for in the future, since I plan to | transition from Windows-first to Linux-first, and can now | take more of my games along with me. | | I don't think Netflix would have had such an easy (as in | straightforward or simple) time of things. Different | audiences, different histories, different use cases and | existing structure, etc. I like their product, but I | don't know how much wiggle room they had when dealing | with 'Big Film', who would have likely been heavy and in | a deep trench. | | Steam was 100% digital from the start, and their | customers were almost guaranteed to have an internet | connection on their PC, which let them make assumptions | about how to move forward. Their main competition was | boxed software being sold in stores. Like you say, they | added value in making it more attractive for _developers_ | to put themselves on the platform, while making it more | attractive for a user to be there as well. | | Netflix was physical-first, and (imo) didn't really | disrupt anything, but just made certain 'workflows' | easier(Don't bother driving to the video store, but still | pick out the movies, and just put them back in the mail) | to achieve. It could have been implemented with a | physical catalog and some postcards, if the web weren't | as developed as it was. | | I don't have hard evidence, but I think that part of | their model relied on _not_ selling, in order to keep | licensing costs down. Since blank DVDs can be had cheap | as dirt, why else would they charge a fee for unreturned | discs? It 's a way for them to show that people aren't | actually _buying_ something, which may mean that they don | 't need to pay as much back to the content owners. | | > Netflix should build tools ... | | Film studios cater to those who are creating something to | be sold in some form, and don't necessarily care about | the consumer at the end(imo). They're B2B, where Steam is | B2B + B2C. Netflix is mostly B2C, but may still have some | innovation left if they take what they're learning with | Originals to build a stronger/more valuable B2B. | gigaflop wrote: | I'm glad to see that Steam has more competition nowadays, | but I'm just not a fan of the competitors. I feel like | some of them have _reduced_ the value they provide to | users by creating their own storefronts /launchers/etc. | | Fortunately for them, they only need to care about | shareholder value. Users come second </s> | | I like GOG enough to willingly use their Galaxy client, | since they tend to provide DRM-free options, and because | buying CDPR games via GOG gives them a bigger share of | revenue without costing me more money or dignity. | | Origin and Uplay seem to add no value for a user, and I | remember a big fuss a while back about Origin scanning | people's PCs a bit too eagerly. I think Ubisoft and EA | also started withdrawing their newer titles from Steam | and the likes to push people towards their own platforms, | but that isn't consumer-friendly in the least bit. | | Epic seems to have had ups and downs with their | store/services. I don't use it personally, but it was | _not_ feature-complete at release[1], and they got a lot | of titles on their service by making exclusivity deals, | instead of by offering a better experience. Metro Exodus | was a particularly stinky example of this, in that people | preordered the game on Steam, only to have a timed | exclusivity deal with Epic put into place shortly before | release. | | If I were a games developer, I don't know if the better | revenue share with Epic would be worth the potential lost | sales from being available everywhere, even if it were | only a timed exclusivity. I'm part of the camp that just | doesn't want to use certain storefronts, so why wouldn't | I expect the same from my customers? | | [1]: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/introducing- | the-epic-... (Because a Shopping Cart feature was | apparently not necessary for their 1.0 release of a video | game storefront) | baud147258 wrote: | > Origin and Uplay seem to add no value for a user, and I | remember a big fuss a while back about Origin scanning | people's PCs a bit too eagerly. | | I think the issue is when EA and Ubisoft bundles Uplay | and Origin in the games distributed through Steam, | forcing you to create a Uplay/origin account and install | it. I understand why they're doing it (so that people | install Uplay/origin), but I really dislike it. Also it | recently prevented me from playing a Ubisoft title, as I | couldn't get it to run with the last Uplay version. | | > I think Ubisoft and EA also started withdrawing their | newer titles from Steam and the likes to push people | towards their own platforms, but that isn't consumer- | friendly in the least bit. | | For EA it worked so well they started putting back their | games on Steam... | gigaflop wrote: | EA and Ubisoft can _try_ to have their cake and eat it | too, but Steam has been better at showing what EULAs and | online accounts are required before a consumer makes a | purchase. The Steam Store page for Assasin 's Creed: | Odyssey (the last Creed game I remember news of) tells us | to expect Denuvo DRM (an anti-feature that some people | boycott, chosen by Ubi), a 3rd-party account requirement, | and whatever the game's actual EULA is. | | Nevermind the face that the game is MSRP on Steam, and | Ubi had it marked down to $15 on their own platform when | I checked. Gee, I wonder why the price hasn't been cut on | Steam? </s> | | As for EA specifically, they've been a bit of a dumpster | fire for PC gamers, and have pushed a lot of 'Games are a | Live Service' stuff. They've released games that are | partially broken on day 1, but have their | microtransaction systems fleshed out. While purchasable | on Steam, their latest Battlefield game still requires an | EA account, to get people onto their Epic Store. It's | just a way to advertise in front of the Steam crowd, to | tease them towards their platform with some discounts. | | (very opinionated, if you haven't noticed) | robotnikman wrote: | >Fortunately for them, they only need to care about | shareholder value. Users come second </s> | | I think the fact that Valve doesn't need to worry about | being strangled by shareholders has been a major | advantage for them, and has led to a higher quality | service than the competition can provide | | Uplay and Origin look like the a cheap ploy to try and | extract more money from users in comparison. | gigaflop wrote: | Fun fact, Tencent (Chinese conglomerate) owns about 40% | of Epic. Ubisoft also tried adding blockchain tech/NFTs | to their games to manage cosmetic items, which is stupid | on multiple levels, IMO, especially since you can't | actually transfer them outside of their closed ecosystem. | | Valve has the breathing room to do what they want. Their | cash cow of Steam helps them out A LOT, since they don't | even need to make games anymore. Instead, they've | invested into what they think benefits the future of | gaming. Who else in the games industry would make a non- | locked-down VR headset, or work on anything Linux- | related? Maybe indies, if they had the money. | | Valve will probably make HL3 at _some point_ , but last I | heard, it was an idea waiting for the right tech. I'd | rather it stay that way if it makes it better. | burntoutfire wrote: | > The FAANG/MANGA -> Startup pipeline is a good one. Learn all | the technical skills and the lay of the land in a great | environment, build strong connections, save up some cash, then | leverage them to succeed in your own interests. | | That's not exactly that story here though. He joined MS when it | was more of a (late stage) startup, not a mega-conglomerate it | is today. Also, he stayed there for a looong time - 13 years. | Thirdly, seeing how he joined MS in 1983 and left in 1996, he | almost certainly was already rich and set for life from the MS | stock when founding Valve. | [deleted] | [deleted] | TheAceOfHearts wrote: | The first name I recognized was Gabe Newell, of Valve fame. | Wonder what he thinks about this. Someone in the Twitter thread | already suggested shooting him an email, hopefully someone does | so and shares his response. | inanutshellus wrote: | One can't help but notice him - it looks like, no matter which | name is clicked, Gabe Newell is highlighted and the background | changes to smile emojis! | bastardoperator wrote: | Half life 3 confirmed? | ZYinMD wrote: | The Windows UI in 1985 looked great. | | (So was the 1984 Macintosh) | LocalH wrote: | The trigger sequence was found. It's different between 1.xx and | 1.01. From BetaWiki: | | > _The sequence for triggering the feature depends on the | version:_ | | > _1.xx: Press Alt+Shift+Esc+Enter_ | | > _1.01 and later: Hold Alt and then Esc, release Alt and then | Esc, press Esc twice and then press Backspace._ | | 1.xx was a slightly prerelease version shipped with the Tulip | System PC Compact. I don't know if anyone has looked in DR5, or | the alpha or beta versions that have been preserved. | | There's a similar egg in 2.x. Also from BetaWiki: | | > _To trigger this easter egg, you must press F1, F5, F9, F4, and | Backspace in quick succession._ | manbash wrote: | A link with all the triggers to the respective versions was | posted down the twitter thread: | https://pastebin.com/raw/FruE3GRX | sillysaurusx wrote: | Was the trigger sequence found by analyzing assembly, or did | someone actually manage to trigger it in the wild? | Darkphibre wrote: | The first time I realized the danger of Easter eggs was one | that was triggered by Alt+Ctrl+Shift+PERIOD or some such. | Tested it out and sure enough it would paste an email exchange | about needing to add an easter egg into a comment field. | | Then I was demoing the software to leadership in a surprise | visit, and it triggered. Turns out, I'd ORed the keys together! | I tried to Ctrl-A+DEL but... the email was longer than the | comment field and triggered a state in which _any_ keypress was | rejected with an alert, even one that would shorten the comment | (bug #2). And I couldn 't leave the form, as the early | prototype was designed to save-on-exit. So I had to kill the | app... lesson learned. | | My last easter egg was simply the name of "Lightish Red" for | one of the AI colors in Halo Infinite. Much safer (once it got | through localization, hah). | fein wrote: | I wonder how many Halo infinite players will know the origins | of lightish red going back to Halo CE, specifically the RvB | web series. I've been out of the video game trend loop since | Halo 2, and am not sure if the modern attention span of a few | months at best enables 10+ year old easter eggs like that to | be understood. I certainly appreciate it, but I also will | probably never play Infinite. | steve76 wrote: | Jerrrry wrote: | >(once it got through localization, hah). | | i can imagine that passed with flying colors | esquivalience wrote: | I believe that is a fair translation of the actual Chinese | word for pink! | Qub3d wrote: | You are the dev that added Lightish Red? | | I want you to know that the reddit halo community loves you. | fps_doug wrote: | I found a VM titled "Windows 1.0 Premiere Edition", both | sequences do nothing. I couldn't find any "About" window to | tell me the exact Windows version, though. | Maursault wrote: | Uh... I am pretty sure that Windows _1.0_ was never released (or | "launched"). Windows 1.01 was released in the US on November 20, | 1985. | ncmncm wrote: | In other news, somebody outside Microsoft did, literally, | anything with Windows 1.0. | VBprogrammer wrote: | It makes me laugh now that Easter eggs were a thing. Can you | imagine getting that past code review these days? And it makes | you wonder, if those were the kind of things you could get | included imagine how easy a inconspicuous privilege escalation | bug would be to slip in. | mrob wrote: | I think Easter eggs should still be included, but they should | be listed in the "Easter Eggs" section of the documentation. | Most people won't bother reading the documentation so the | effect will be close enough. | bugmen0t wrote: | Firefox has easter eggs AND visible credits. The former I won't | tell. The latter is about:credits. | shadowofneptune wrote: | It was a problem even at the time, as Easter eggs took up a | fair amount of memory on microcomputers. The famous WAIT6502,10 | in Microsoft BASIC Easter egg would be removed by some vendors: | https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20220128-microsoft-commodor... | | I'm not sure Microsoft did formal code review at the time, by | the way. Windows was the first time its rather informal | development practices became a liability. | Mayzie wrote: | Every Android version has a unique easter egg (repeatedly | tapping something in the Developer menu). It is still very much | a thing, but a lot rarer. | jstanley wrote: | I don't think a privilege escalation bug in Windows 1.0 would | be of much value. | ale42 wrote: | Especially that there are no privileges to escalate... | blenderdt wrote: | Have you already found your shark in your Opel/Vauxhall | interior? | | Easter eggs are still a thing, in software and even in | production cars. | eloisant wrote: | Nah, Easter eggs can still totally be a thing. It's not | necessarily something that a developer sneaks in alone, it can | be something a whole team in agrees on. | | I guess they're less of a thing now because it's been done so | much, and with Internet everyone is immediately aware of it, | they're not as fun as in the past. | | Android for example had multiple easter eggs, when you go the | phone information and tap multiple times on the version number | you get an animation. | yreg wrote: | In /r/teslamotors users often complain that the company | spends too much effort on easter eggs. | lopis wrote: | If anything, Easter eggs became as pervasive as April's | fools jokes and turning your logo rainbow during June. 37 | years is a record, but an Easter egg shouldn't be something | everyone knows and that is everywhere. | xiphias2 wrote: | I'm sure that if the Tesla team could launch real full self | driving instead of coding up the easter eggs, they would | have done, but some people just don't understand that it's | not the same amount of effort. | onion2k wrote: | _Can you imagine getting that past code review these days?_ | | I can, yes. Easter eggs aren't some clever thing that a | developer sneakily included. They're just features that aren't | documented. They go through planning, dev, QA, etc like | everything else. | criddell wrote: | I can't imagine the flight simulator in Excel went through | planning and QA. | DeathArrow wrote: | >They go through planning, dev, QA, etc like everything else. | | And the product owner agrees spending half of the sprint | points on Easter eggs. :) | mcast wrote: | I strongly recommend watching "Dave's Garage" on YouTube. He | gives a pretty interesting insight in how code was built and | easter eggs were added in his Windows NT days. He's also the | same MSFT employee who created the task manager and ported the | Pinball game onto Windows XP. | notRobot wrote: | They have some great Reddit threads: | | I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something... https | ://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote... | | AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kfpjhg/i_am_dave_ | plum... | phtrivier wrote: | I wish "crediting the people who wrote the software you're using" | was not something that had to be hidden behind easter eggs. | | As far as I know, the only kind of software that routinely does | that is games ; and I suspect it is because games have an | "ending", and the analogy works with plays and movies that have | credits in the end. | | The software departments of any Marvel / Pixar flicks is probably | bigger than most of the teams I worked with, and noone seems to | be terrified to see their names printed after the generic bad guy | with the blue skybeam is defeated... | | Open source projects have an AUTHORs.txt file ; would it really | break the stability of the financial world if they had a | `--credits` flag, too ? | mananaysiempre wrote: | There are some reflections on that in view of the story of the | original Macintosh on Folklore.org, in particular in "Credit | where due"[1] (which seems to suggest this has been the | original purpose of the About box--note GNOME still uses it | that way) and "Signing party"[2] (which discusses the problem | of drawing the line), see also "Steve icon"[3]. | | [1] | https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&/sto... | | [2] | https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... | | [3] | https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... | sacrosancty wrote: | But why? People who know those individuals can easily know what | they did and they're just meaningless names to everyone else. | Credits in movies are ridiculous. What even is a "best boy | grip" and why does everyone need to know his name? With actors, | it makes sense and the audience gets value from that. But do | people have favorite best boy grips that put some special touch | on the movie to make it better than all those others? | | Do you want names of engineers on physical products too? Brand | names and compliance logos are bad enough. | djkoolaide wrote: | For those like me who were curious, from the Wikipedia | article[1]: | | _According to the OED, "It has been suggested that it | originated as a term for a master's most able apprentice, or | alternatively that it was transferred from earlier use for a | member of a ship's crew, but confirmatory evidence for either | of these theories appears to be lacking." The earliest known | appearance of the phrase in print is 1931 from the | Albuquerque Journal: "Among the electricians ... the | department head is the gaffer, his first assistant is the | best boy."_ | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_boy | nattaylor wrote: | Photoshop loading screen used to do it | | I haven't used PS recently to know it is still does | maxsilver wrote: | Photoshop 2022 still has a credit list on the splash screen. | | I don't know if that's _everyone_ at Adobe on Photoshop or | not, but there 's 50-ish or more names on the splash screen | at launch. - https://natashashaneek.com/adobe-photoshop- | splash-screen-202... | CharlesW wrote: | It does, with the "most important" people shown by default. | If you hold Option (on macOS) while choosing "About | Photoshop...", you'll get a scrolling movie-credits-type list | that appears to show everyone who worked on the release. | stormbrew wrote: | > As far as I know, the only kind of software that routinely | does that is games | | This actually took some time to become the norm, with some | really notorious incidents of companies that _refused_ to let | developers be credited in game. The Castlevania games, for eg, | had fake horror movie-ish names in their credits. The developer | credit in Adventure was an easter egg as well. Even Nintendo | games had credits that were often full of pseudonyms. | [deleted] | baud147258 wrote: | Jira (at least the version deployed in my current workplace, | v8.14.1) has a credits button in the header. | phtrivier wrote: | The hosted (*.atlassian.net) version does not seem to have | it, though :/ | lopis wrote: | I think it's because games are often closer to art, and in the | art world, crediting the creators is common. | jandrese wrote: | The business of making movies means that people in the industry | are constantly having to find new work. Having their name | advertised is probably helpful in landing a job on the next | film. | | Software development is supposed to be a more steady career, so | the need to constantly advertise yourself isn't as pressing. | That said if you want to move up and get bigger paychecks it | definitely helps to get your name out there. | 13of40 wrote: | The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago) was | that listing your developers like that was a good way to get | them poached by other companies. Crediting people by name is | always a bit of a minefield anyway. Do test engineers and SRE | get included? Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his | name come first or do you do it alphabetically? Etc. | 0xcde4c3db wrote: | A similar policy with a similar motivation was allegedly a | major factor in the commonly-cited "first easter egg" in | _Adventure_ for the Atari 2600, as well as the founding of | Activision. | phtrivier wrote: | > The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago) | was that listing your developers like that was a good way to | get them poached by other companies. | | I have to doubt the argument here. I was there 20 years ago, | and the companies that wanted to recruit would just get the | listing of all CS students for that year from university | notebooks, and called them in a row. Why didn't MS forbid | employees from being in their phone books or university | facebooks ? | | > Do test engineers and SRE get included? | | Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy get | credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of | cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in | the credits.) | | SREs is a much more interesting question ; since it's more of | a "person keeping the lights on" thing than, "person who | built the thing." | | Then again, whose business collapses if they get their name | written somewhere ? | | So SAAS credits would be a "dynamic" thing, in a "credits" | page that gets updated every so often. Pretty much like the | credits of this week episode of any TV show is just every so | slighly different that the previous weeks's one. | | > Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his name come | first or do you do it alphabetically | | Alphabetically. Yes. | | And if you really want to overthink it: alphabetically, | organised by team / department / components / whatever, with | the name of the "Head xxx" or "Xxx lead" first. | | Basically, the same way you publish the org chart of some | levels of your company. Since Conway's law is the only law, | your org charts and your products probably have the same | structure anyway. | | Do companies ask people to hide the fact that they are | "deputy-head-lead of quality synergies" on linkedin, in case | they are poached ? | mananaysiempre wrote: | > Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy | get credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of | cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in | the credits.) | | No particular deep knowledge here, but: my impression is | this was a long and painful push by various unions and | agents, with "top billing" becoming an actual thing to be | negotiated as part of an actor's contract, etc. Even having | the end credits at all seems to be a workaround for | accomodating the enormous number of people who insist on | being credited: movies from the 30s seem to be perfectly | content to just list the production company, the stars, and | maybe the director at the start. | | Of course, it takes at most a couple generations of | professionals to shift from "this is a thing won through | hard negotiations" to "this is a thing that everybody is | entitled to by common morality", but my point is it didn't | (appear to) start that way, it had to be squeezed out from | the execs over years. | | (Of course movies also don't need maintenance or | refactoring, at least not in the sense of requiring other | actors and camera crews to come in.) | Melatonic wrote: | It was definitely a thing unions fought for - a big thing | actually. | | This is the reason why there are so many people missing | on movie credits who worked on the VFX - there is no VFX | union (there was a huge scheme by some very big name | assholes back in the day to block it - and a huge court | settlement). Watch any major Marvel or other VFX heavy | film and some of the studios will get full credits for | their teams while other smaller ones will just list the | studio name, the VFX Supervisor (top of the chain) and a | few other people. There are tons and tons missing. | jgrahamc wrote: | _Back in 1985, there weren 't actually any tools that could | discover this kind of extra data._ | | Uh, what? | Cpoll wrote: | You snipped off some context, though, that makes it a bit more | reasonable. I think in this context the "tool" would be some | sort of steganography-detection utility. | | _According to Brooks, the hidden dialog was placed in | encrypted form at the end of the smiley bitmap file included | with the operating system. Back in 1985, there weren 't | actually any tools that could discover this kind of extra | data._ | jgrahamc wrote: | Disagree. We had hex editors, we were used to looking at | assembly and machine code. This could absolutely have been | discovered if someone had looked. Oh, and the encryption was | a simple XOR. | [deleted] | agravier wrote: | Computers didn't exist! | danbruc wrote: | Computers existed, they were just mechanical or human until | the invention of electrons. | medstrom wrote: | Electrons always existed. | tasty_freeze wrote: | Not until the universe was somewhere between one and ten | seconds old. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe# | Lep... | adrian_b wrote: | No, electrons existed as far back as we can model, but | they were accompanied by an almost equal quantity of | anti-electrons (positrons). | | As long as the temperature was high enough, there was a | balance between annihilation reactions of electrons and | positrons and generation of electron-positron pairs. | | After the temperature decreased a lot, much lower than | the temperature where the protons and all the neutrons | that had not decayed yet had combined into nuclei of | helium and lithium, all the positrons annihilated with | most of the electrons, so only a much smaller number of | electrons survived. | | After further cooling, most of the electrons became bound | to nuclei, and all the matter became plasma, like most of | the matter in the present universe still is (because most | of the matter is inside the stars). | tasty_freeze wrote: | You are right that I quoted the wrong section. | | The earlier section says that the electromagnetic force | didn't exist in its current form until 10*-12 seconds or | so, when the electromagnetic and weak forces split from a | combined "electroweak" force into their current forms. | danbruc wrote: | _After further cooling, most of the electrons became | bound to nuclei, and all the matter became plasma, like | most of the matter in the present universe still is | (because most of the matter is inside the stars)._ | | When electrons bind to nuclei, a plasma turns into a | neutral gas, this happened in the recombination phase. | The neutral gas then collapsed into stars which turned | the gas making up the stars back into plasma. Also the | energetic photons emitted by stars started turning the | remaining gas back into a plasma which is called the | reionization phase. | Siecje wrote: | Are we sure there is more than one? | pmontra wrote: | How did we get from Easter Eggs to this | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe ? | Cthulhu_ wrote: | They were only invented in the 1800's by Big Power to | sell electricity. | elzbardico wrote: | Don't be silly, electrons were invented by Benjamin | Franklin on his garage in Palo Alto. | bitwize wrote: | I always liked the story of how Gabe Newell decided to quit | Microsoft and establish Valve. | | The story goes that Newell was doing analytics for Microsoft by | running software that scanned and reported what people had | installed on their PCs -- this was back in the Windows 3.x days | when Microsoft sought consent from the user before doing this | kind of thing. Microsoft wanted to know how many PCs had Windows | running on them. Gabe's market research found that a great many | PCs did have Windows -- Windows was the second most installed | software on the PCs surveyed. | | Number one was Doom. | | After that, Gaben started thinking maybe gaming was a better | play. | Melatonic wrote: | Awesome story - and totally makes sense. Gabe was seeing things | way ahead of his time | azhenley wrote: | Fascinating! Any resource you recommend to learn more about | this origin story? | pavlov wrote: | _> "this was back in the Windows 3.x days when Microsoft sought | consent from the user before doing this kind of thing"_ | | Since nobody had an Internet connection in those days, it was | literally impossible to get the data back to Microsoft without | the user's involvement. | | If 1993 Microsoft could have collected this data automatically, | they certainly would have. | AdmiralAsshat wrote: | Yeah, I'm curious how exactly this data got back to | Microsoft. We had a family computer back in the day that | definitely ran DOS / Windows 3.1 / Doom, so we in theory | would have been one of those data points. But with no | internet for another 5-8 years or so, I can say pretty | confidently that the number of floppies I sent _to Microsoft_ | with data from my computer was a big fat zero. | | So how would they have retrieved this data? | Melatonic wrote: | I am guessing a floppy mailed back and forth | pavlov wrote: | I've been reading Steven Sinofsky's extremely detailed blog | about those days (it's at | https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com). He was in | charge of Office in the late '90s. | | He mentions that Microsoft had a program where they | partnered with large enterprises to collect usage data from | corporate desktops. But those computers were on a network | even if though often not on the Internet yet. | | Stats that would show Doom towering over Windows 3.1 must | have been collected manually, maybe by sending people a | floppy that contained a program to collect the data, and | asking them to mail it back in. "Insert floppy, then type | A:\SPY.EXE in your DOS prompt" ... | reaperducer wrote: | _Since nobody had an Internet connection in those days, it | was literally impossible to get the data back to Microsoft | without the user 's involvement._ | | What makes you think that "nobody" had an internet connection | in "those days?" We weren't riding around on the backs of | dinosaurs and cooking up bronto-burgers on the weekends. | | Winsock came out in June of 1992, right in the middle of the | Windows 3.x life cycle. | pavlov wrote: | Well, ok. But if the data point is "X% of users have DOOM | installed but not Windows", how does Winsock help you get | that data to Microsoft? | | I do remember using Winsock on Windows 3.1 to grab Usenet | updates on expensive dial-up. The batch Internet :) | ourmandave wrote: | I wonder when MS solitaire became number 1. | | Wikipedia says it originally came with Windows 3.0 back in | 1990. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire | pontifk8r wrote: | Pretty sure that's not what happened. Gabe had a different view | of how PCs would become a bigger part of entertainment (this is | in the 90's, when watching video on PCs was heresy!), starting | with PCs in the living room. He tried to sell management on his | vision, but this being the old Microsoft, he lost an internal | battle. He proved his entertainment vision in the best way | possible -- Building Valve Software by telling great stories, | making great games, building an ecosystem, and now branching | into hardware. | anthk wrote: | > (this is in the 90's, when watching video on PCs was | heresy!), | | Are you sure? After the multimedia PC, and later videoCD's | and DivX it wasn't an heresy any more. | hbn wrote: | > making great games | | I kinda wish they'd dabble back into this area. The Portal | games are some of the most interesting, atmospheric, and | well-humoured games I've ever played. And it seems that after | Portal 2 they got so hooked into VR that all they've really | made is a bunch of VR demos. | | But whatever, the Steam Deck seems like it has the potential | to really revolutionize a new space in PC gaming, so maybe | it's better they stay focused on one thing at a time than | half-assedly do a bunch of things like Microsoft or Google. | netsharc wrote: | Article is missing how to trigger it, but the tweet-writer | doesn't know either: | | > Of course Microsoft did a really good job at hiding it and I | still don't really know how to trigger it. I patched some | binaries to force it to show up. | | https://twitter.com/mswin_bat/status/1504789141816455168 | jiveturkey wrote: | Maybe there's no trigger. You "trigger" it by inspecting the | binary. Like how sometimes circuit boards and even circuits | (even some chips famously) have embedded easter eggs. To some | degree for someone to discover but more for the authors to | celebrate their creation. | tupac_speedrap wrote: | Is it really an easter egg if you have to change binaries to | get it to display? Seems more like an unused asset that they | didn't take out. | LocalH wrote: | The triggers were found. It's a straight up egg. | willcipriano wrote: | Cut content is what they would call it if it was a video | game. Easter Egg is as close as a journalist is going to | get. | usrusr wrote: | The "congrats" UI clearly puts it in easter egg territory | though, even if the intended trigger was cut. Might be | cut or perhaps the trigger still exists in the released | binary but hasn't been discovered yet. But easter egg | would be applicable in either case. | bombcar wrote: | Sometimes the trigger would be removed in later development | but the data left in (or forgotten). | scrlk wrote: | One of the DEC Vax chips had an Easter egg message in | Cyrillic for the Russian engineers who were reverse | engineering DEC systems to clone: | https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html | elevaet wrote: | I wonder if they cloned it complete with the message? | netsharc wrote: | I guess your question refers to the cloned B-29 where a | US factory worker made a wrong rivet hole and this hole | was cloned by the Soviets? | | https://aviationhumor.net/soviet-b-29-clone-the-tupolev- | tu-4... | blamazon wrote: | A parable on Stalinist management technique: | | "'What kind of stars should be put on the mass-produced | aircraft - white American stars or red Soviet ones? If | you put white stars, you risked being shot as an enemy of | the people. If you put red, first, it will not be a copy, | and second maybe Stalin is planning to use the bombers | against America, England or China, and therefore keep the | American markings.' The question went all the way up to | Stalin himself: Beria (NKVD chief, in charge of B-29 | duplication project) 'told Stalin about the stars as if | it were a funny story and that by the way in which Stalin | laughed at the joke, Beria knew unerringly which stars | should be used. The last problem was solved and mass- | production started...'" | retrac wrote: | Alas Communism fell before they could get that far! And | they would have been better off using German. The Russian | message was first added to the '87 CVAX. But Robotron (an | East German company) had only just started their first | runs [1] of the '85 MicroVAX 78032 clone in 1990 when the | company was liquidated. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U80701 | ungruntled wrote: | Any site that hijacks the back button to show you ads is similar | to a creep locking you briefly in a room so you 'consider' their | offer. | 10729287 wrote: | I don't understand all those mentions of websites hijacking | back buttons. I've been able to use it in both my main browser, | Firefox with Ublock origin, and Vanilla MS Edge. | kyrra wrote: | It tends to be a bigger issue on mobile, where very few | people block ads. | theyeenzbeanz wrote: | It's been horrendous on mobile lately. Sometimes it'll | still hijack my back button on desktop with ublock and | privacy badger. | seanw444 wrote: | I wonder why. Firefox Mobile has uBlock Origin too. Can't | believe people can bear to open a browser without it. If it | didn't have uBlock, I would save the web browsing mostly | for the desktop. | dijonman2 wrote: | I thought this only applies to Android? | | I think Firefox on iOS uses webkit and doesn't support | addons. There is firefox focus which does block ads but | also only supports one tab at a time. | brimble wrote: | Focus can act as an ad blocker for Safari too, IIRC. | | IIRC because I think that's what I did before I had a | PiHole doing most of that, but I can't remember for sure. | rwalle wrote: | You can do it on iOS: | | https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/enable-content-blockers- | saf... | DelilahHoare wrote: | Which is surprising because mobile is especially unusable | without ad blocking. | Findecanor wrote: | As if three popups wasn't enough to make users not want to | visit the site every again ... | [deleted] | walnutclosefarm wrote: | More surprising than that it took 37 years to find the easter | egg, is that 37 years on from its release, someone with the tech | skills to find it was bored enough to waste time sifting rough | Windows 1.0 binaries looking for ... anything. There wasn't | anything worth the effort it took to write in Windows 1.0 when it | was brand new. | xattt wrote: | I can see this as a psyops strategy by adverse actors: provide | enough time-wasting entertainment to drain away the creativity | of a nation. | dotancohen wrote: | Strategic offensive nerd-sniping. | ale42 wrote: | "This" as the ancient-easter-egg-finding, or as spending days | on youtube? | sydthrowaway wrote: | China + TikTok for sure. | notRobot wrote: | Agreed 100%. Windows 1.0 was way before my time, and I have no | idea where I would even start if I wanted to sift through those | binaries or patch them like this person did. | | I hope all of this information about legacy systems is | documented somewhere on the internet, but I'm a afraid a lot of | it might not be, and is lost as these older devs who made and | worked with these systems get older and pass away. | nitrogen wrote: | Look up retrocomputing -- lots of people preserving history | for fun. | protontorpedo wrote: | With the enormous amount of time we all waste in cheap | entertainment this days, I think the willingness to spend as | much time digging and tweaking and hacking is to be celebrated. | reaperducer wrote: | Some people binge 200 hours of so-called reality TV a week. | Others dig into the code of dead operating systems. | | I would think that on HN one of these would automatically be | considered more worthy of one's time than the other. | openknot wrote: | One of the most hardworking people I know, who is | academically accomplished and had an extraordinarily high | amount of research experience as an undergraduate, spent | most of his free time on mindless reality TV. | | He told me that the idea was to 'shut his brain off' from | his day-to-day work, while other more intensive hobbies | would drain him further. | protontorpedo wrote: | That's absolutely fair and I'm not trying to imply that | cheap entertainment is all bad. It was more of a reaction | to the parent comment, which seemeed to imply that the | endeavour wasn't worth it. | jatone wrote: | but i do both simultaneously.... the tv is background | noise. | msl wrote: | Yeah, figuring out how to fit 200 hours of anything into | 168 hours seems like a worthy endeavor indeed. | drewzero1 wrote: | You could just squeak by if you watched it on 1.25s | speed. You'd even have 8 hours to nap or go to the | bathroom! | ALittleLight wrote: | You could increase your throughput with multiple monitors | to simultaneously view multiple episodes. A bit of gaze | detection and audio could switch to whichever feed your | eyes focused on. | Someone wrote: | On the plus side, there's not much sifting to do. The OS ran in | 256 kilobytes of memory, and shipped on five 51/4 inch floppy | disks. | | Given the size of the code, once you've found the dialog, I | guess backtracking to see how it can get called isn't too hard | (a fuzzer that you can ask "give me a series of inputs that | gets this procedure called" might even answer that question for | you) | em3rgent0rdr wrote: | Maybe this was the result of an educational exercise. | Archaeologists will similarly sift through piles of sand to | find little fragments from the past. Or could have been a | challenge done simply for fun. Not necessarily "bored". | agumonkey wrote: | Hey, maybe it wasn't a fruitless endeavour.. maybe someone was | confused as to why a graphical shell was so tiny in comparison | to his main electronjs app and decided to poke at tiny native | code / assembler. | enoent wrote: | Supposedly there's an easter egg in Windows CE's Solitaire [1] | that has never managed to surface, beyond someone posting part of | the credits text in a comment. No screenshots, videos, or any | other evidence of its existence. | | It's an exercise in frustration. Following the posted steps | doesn't activate it in qemu or virtual pc (other vms don't seem | to support Windows CE). Could be buggy virtualization, could be | that it only exists in a particular version of Windows CE | (judging from the date it was posted, maybe 2.11/3.0/HPC2000), or | only in some OEM's custom ROM. Even if you wanted to dig into the | ROM, strings are encoded in some LZ77 variant, so nothing | greppable upfront. ROM dumping tools were made for extracting | specific ROMs (you never know which ones and which offsets | exactly), and are pretty much undocumented. Still plenty reverse | engineering effort to be done. | | [1]: https://eeggs.com/items/487.html | ok123456 wrote: | If you want the history behind early Windows, read "Barbarians | Lead by Bill Gates." Windows 1.0 a direct response to a demo from | VisiCorp for a graphical desktop environment called "Visi On" [1] | in 1982. | | Some other things in that book that I learned: Microsoft passed | on the opportunity to use Postscript. Windows running in | protected mode started as someone's summer skunkworks project at | a time when the company assumed that OS/2 was the actual future. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-24 23:01 UTC)