Easter eggs in Microsoft products

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since August 2006.

Some of Microsoft's early products included hidden Easter eggs. Microsoft formally stopped including Easter eggs in its programs as part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002.^[1]

1 Microsoft Bear
2 Microsoft Bunny
3 Microsoft Office
4 Windows 98
5 Internet Explorer
- 5.1 Internet Explorer 4.0
- 5.2 Internet Explorer 7.0
6 Hover!
7 Links to references
8 Notes and references
9 See also

[edit] Microsoft Bear

Drawing of the Bear was the icon for some Windows system files

The Microsoft Bear is the most famous among the mascots of the Windows 3.1 (and later Windows 95) team. It was the teddy bear that one of the senior developers on the team used to carry around. He makes several cameo appearances in Windows:

A drawing of him was used as the icon for the SETDEBUG.EXE and JDBGMGR.EXE system files. The odd icon gave credibility to the jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax, claiming that the files were part of a virus.^[2] See SULFNBK.EXE for a similar hoax.
Several internal system functions, although having meaningful internal names, are exported from USER.EXE as BEARNNN (where NNN is the ordinal number of the function) in his honor (and to discourage their use from uncautious third party software developers).
He stars

Microsoft Bear appearance in an easter egg

in two distinct easter eggs in Windows 3.1. The first one^[3] was the reference to a fictitious file named BEAR.EXE, and in the other one^[4] the Bear, along with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Brad Silverberg, presents the email aliases of the Windows 3.1 developers. bradsi, being in charge of Windows production, is listed first (see picture); the three other presenters, billg, steveb, and t-bear, appear together in "Special Thanks", the last section of the list.

[edit] Microsoft Bunny

During the development of Microsoft Windows 95 the shell developers had several stuffed animals as mascots. One was Bear, who was a hold-over from Windows 3.1. There were two different bunnies as well: the smaller one called 16-bit Bunny and the larger one called 32-bit Bunny. The naming is connected to the fact that Windows 95 was the transitional OS between the 16-bit era of Windows 3.x and the new 32-bit era.

Windows 95 was designed to run on very minimal computing resources even for that time: a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. During the development, it was decided to remove features that drastically affected the performance on these low-end computers. These removed features, along with enhancements to other features and games, went into the Plus! Pack, which had much higher system requirements than the base operating system.

In the case of the 32-bit Bunny, knowledge of it was actually somewhat useful to end-users. These features needed to be turned on while Windows 95 was tested and the secret of turning them on was not removed. Some of the desktop features, including full window drag and anti-aliased fonts, could be turned on by placing the line ILOVEBUNNY32=1 under the windows section in win.ini.

Just like the Bear, the Bunny has an exported function named after him. This time, it's BUNNY_351 in krnl386.exe. The bunny is actually sometimes mistaken for a virus, and is mistakenly removed by some anti-virus programs.

SETDEBUG.EXE is still included in Windows XP.

[edit] Microsoft Office

[edit] Microsoft Word

Every version of Microsoft Word from 97 on contains what is apparently a hidden diagnostic feature: typing "=rand()" (without quotation marks) in a Word document and hitting Return results in 3 paragraphs of 5 repetitions of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". "=rand(X,Y)" (without quotation marks and with numbers for X and Y) results in X paragraphs of Y repetitions of the sentence. For example, "=rand(10,10)" will produce ten paragraphs, each with ten repetitions. However, Microsoft describes this as a feature and not an easter egg.[1]

As of the 2007 Office version, this feature outputs the following editing tips in order, repeating:

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document.
You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks.
When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look.
You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab.
You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab.
Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly.
To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab.
To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command.
Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.

[edit] Office 6.0/95

The tip of the day sometimes would display the following fun and inspirational tips. They could also be viewed in the help file.

If you do your best, whatever happens will be for the best.
Things that go away by themselves can come back by themselves.
Plaid shirts and striped pants rarely make a positive fashion statement.
You should never dive into murky waters.
It's never too late to learn to play the piano.
You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors.
You should never look directly at the sun.

[edit] Office 97

Microsoft Excel contained a hidden flight simulator.^[5]^[6]
Microsoft Word contained a hidden pinball game.^[7]

The Word 97 Pinball.

[edit] Office 2000

Following in the tradition of hiding a small game in Microsoft Office programs, using Microsoft Excel 2000 and the Microsoft Office Web Components, a small 3-D game called "Dev Hunter" (inspired by Spy Hunter) is accessible.^[8] DirectX must be installed for this to work, and the egg is incompatible with certain service pack upgrades. This easter egg can be activated by performing the following steps:

Open a new Excel book.
Go to the File menu and select 'Save As Webpage'.
In the dialog box for Save As, select 'Selection: Sheet' and check the box labeled 'Add Interactivity'.
Click the 'Publish' button (file name is irrelevant).
On the Publish dialog box that appears, simply click the 'Publish' button again.
Open the .htm file that was created in Microsoft Internet Explorer (it should appear as a blank page with an Excel spreadsheet in the centre- if it doesn't, you likely don't have the Microsoft Office Web Components installed).
Scroll to the cell in row 2000, column WC. Align the spreadsheet so this cell is the first cell on the left. Select the whole row, with the cell in column WC sub-selected (it will be white, while the rest of the row will be colored light purple).
Hold down the Shift, Control, and Alt keys and left-click on the Office logo (the square composed of puzzle pieces).

The Dev Hunter game should now open. The car can be controlled using the arrow keys, the spacebar fires projectiles, and the 'H' and 'O' keys activate headlights and an oilslick, respectively. Developer credits and humorous sentences appear on the roadway. Interestingly, collisions between the car the user controls and other cars, as well as collisions between the other cars themselves, appear to correctly follow the principle of Conservation of Momentum.

[edit] List of Roadway Comments

Note: The capitalization present in these sentences are how they appear in the game.

WE ARE SPECIAL TOO
YOU WILL RESPECT THE RECTANGLES
DONT SKIMP ON THE DATA
WHAT DO THESE PEOPLE DO AGAIN
SO YOUR NAME IS MISSPELLED WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT
CIRCLES ARE GOOD TOO BUT THEYRE NOT RECTANGLES
PIVOT PIVOT PIVOT CANT GET ENOUGH
MALICIOUS PIXIES
A CHART SAYS SO MUCH EVEN THOUGH IT DOESNT REALLY SAY ANYTHING BECAUSE IT CANT TALK
THANKS FOR SHARING
LAST BUT NOT LEAST AND ALSO NOT COMPRESSED HAM
SUPER FUNK DATA

[edit] Windows 98

Windows 98 credits egg

Windows 98 has a credits screen easter egg.^[9] There are two ways to view it. One involves the Date/Time properties dialog box, but the more straightforward method is listed below:

Create a shortcut to the Weldata.exe program in the C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Welcome directory.
Right-click on the shortcut and open the Properties dialog box.
In the target path field, add the text "You_are_a_real_rascal" to the end of the path (without the quotes).
In the Run field, select Minimized.
After making these changes, double-click on the shortcut and the credits egg should open.

If you pay attention to the disclaimer at the end, you should see some funny stuff.

[edit] Internet Explorer

[edit] Internet Explorer 4.0

This only works in Internet Explorer 4.0. To view this easter egg, go into the Help menu and select the "About Internet Explorer" option. Hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard and drag the blue IE logo over the globe icon, then from left to right, pushing the words off of the screen. Click the newly exposed "Unlock" button, which will cause the globe icon to shake. Hold the Ctrl key down again and drag the IE logo onto the shaking globe. The Internet Explorer 4.0 team credits will roll in a new window,^[10] with occasional intermissions containing various in-jokes, such as a reference to the Bear and Bunny (both mentioned above) in the very end of the credits text: "Disclaimer: No fluffy warm creatures were maimed, dismembered, tortured, deplumed, discarded, deflowered, dropped, twisted, wrungOut, extended, respliced, broken, humiliated, irradiated, browbeaten, pickled, deluded, duped, detained, mishandled, desiccated, bronzed, belittled, coddled, expelled, deported, imbibed, elected, marginalized, placated, misrepresented, overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, prepackaged, overly petted, genetically altered or cloned during the making of this product, except of course for Bunny and Bear" (punctuation added for clarity)

[edit] Internet Explorer 7.0

There are hidden credits in version 7.0 of Microsoft Internet Explorer

Open Internet Explorer 7.0 and type in res://shdoclc.dll/wcee.htm then click Go.
When it loads, a black page appears. Right click and select View Source - it opens in Notepad.
Find in this text: gurjPRR. This will find 2 lines of text including If and DecodeStr. Highlight and delete them.
Now save this text file as: wcee[1].html
Open the HTML file you saved and it will show fast scrolling credits about the staff and developers who made IE 7.[2]

[edit] Hover!

Screenshot from a hacked .maz file

Hover! is a video game that came bundled with Windows 95. It was a showcase for the advanced multimedia capabilities available on personal computers at the time. It is still available from Microsoft [3] and can be run on all of Microsoft's operating systems released since Windows 95 including Windows Vista.

One level (shown as "small.maz" in the mazes directory of the game) is used as the introduction level shown when the game finishes starting up. While the player cannot move your ship or indeed move at all, if the player manages to relocate his or her car through some creative hacking, he or she can view pictures of the developer's heads.

The player cannot simply rename and load this level normally; the maze is missing spawns for all other objects and crashes immediately on load.