Developer

Looking back at other Microsoft Easter Eggs

By // September 29, 2007, 12:06 AM PST

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  • By Greg Shultz

    Microsoft developers from various development projects hid Easter Eggs in their applications. While the majority of Easter Eggs are designed to give credit to the developers, some are just plain goofy. Let’s take a look.

  • Internet Explorer 4.0

    Of all the versions of Internet Explorer that Microsoft created, only version 4.0 came with a self contained Easter Egg that still functions. To access this Easter Egg, you pull down the Help menu and select the About Internet Explorer command. Once you see the About Internet Explorer dialog box, you’ll note that there are three objects in the dialog box: the globe, the e icon, and the logo.

  • Internet Explorer 4.0

    At this point, you hold down [Ctrl] key and then click and drag the e icon and drop it on the globe. You then release the [Ctrl] key.

  • Internet Explorer 4.0

    You then hold down [Ctrl] key and click and drag the e icon slowly to the right side of the dialog box. As you do, the logo moves to the right and off the screen. As it does, a button titled Unlock is revealed. After you drop the e icon, you click the Unlock button. When you do, the globe begins to shake and shimmy. While it is essentially dancing around in the dialog box, you once again hold down [Ctrl] key and click and drag the e icon and drop it on the globe.

  • Internet Explorer 4.0

    As soon as you drop the e icon on the globe, the globe expands until it fills the dialog box and then the dialog box goes black and the e icon grows until it almost fills the dialog box.

  • Internet Explorer 4.0

    You’ll then see an introductory message over top of the enlarged e icon.

  • Internet Explorer 4.0

    You then see the names of the various people on the IE 4 team interspersed with a bunch of humorous comments and jokes.

  • FrontPage 2000

    As you may know Office 2000 was the first version of Office to actually come with a version of FrontPage. And, like its Office counterparts, FrontPage 2000 contained an Easter Egg.

    To access this Easter Egg from within FrontPage 2000, you hold down [Shift] key, pull down the Help menu, and select the About Microsoft FrontPage command. Once you see the About Microsoft FrontPage dialog box, just click OK.

    While still holding down the [Shift] key, you’ll repeat these steps—pull down the Help menu, select the About Microsoft FrontPage command, and click OK.

    Continue holding down the [Shift] key, pull down the Help menu, and then select the About Microsoft FrontPage command.

  • FrontPage 2000

    As soon as you select the About Microsoft FrontPage command for the third time, you see dialog box titled FrontPage 2000 Is Brought To You By. As soon as it appears, you’ll hear jazzy music and see the names of the folks on the team scroll across the screen as fireworks explode in the screen background.

  • FrontPage 2000

    As the Easter Egg progresses along, multiple names will fly across the screen.

  • Imaging for Windows

    Windows 98 included an imaging package that Microsoft licensed from Kodak called Imaging for Windows. This program could be used to view, print, or manage images from faxes, scanners, or graphics programs. As you can imagine, the developers decided to put an Easter Egg in the application.

    To access this Easter Egg from within Imaging, pull down the Help menu, and select the About Imaging command.

  • Imaging for Windows

    Once you see the About Imaging dialog box, you press [Alt] I and you’ll see a small window appear that contains a scrolling list of the names of the developers.

  • Microsoft Chat 2.5

    Before NetMeeting and MSN Messenger, there was Microsoft Chat. In this communication program you participate in a live, 3-D visual environment using an Avatar, a virtual on-screen character that you use to navigate your 3-D visual environment and communicate with other Avatars. Of course, this was all the rage back in the mid 90’s and Microsoft was betting that it would really catch on.

    In any case, the developers of Microsoft Chat 2.5 put together a pretty elaborate Easter Egg, which of course was centered around the developers’ Avatars. To access this Easter Egg from within Microsoft Chat, you type WhoIsTheGenius? in the text box. You then hold [Ctrl] and [Shift] and click the Open Favorites button.

  • Microsoft Chat 2.5

    You then see the Easter Egg, which is laid out like a comic strip. (The first version of this program was actually called Microsoft Comic Chat.) If you read the panels, you’ll see that after each of the developers introduced themselves, their Avatars would do a little dance.

  • Microsoft Chat 2.5

    The comic panels went on for quite some time as each developer got his or her chance to make themselves known to the world.

  • Microsoft Chat 2.5

    Finally, one of the Avatars decided to put a stop to the Easter Egg.

  • Microsoft Diagnostics 2.0

    Back in the Windows 3.1 days, you would have to shell out to DOS to run various utilities. One of these utilities was called Microsoft Diagnostics; or MSD for short. While MSD 2.0 doesn’t actually contain a standard, credits type of Easter Egg, there was a humorous comment hidden in the tool that could be considered an Easter Egg, just for the fact that it is hidden and unexpected.

  • Microsoft Diagnostics 2.0

    To access this Easter Egg from within MSD, you press [Alt] H or click Help, if you had a mouse.

  • Microsoft Diagnostics 2.0

    You then press Enter or click About to display the About dialog box. While this dialog box is on the screen, you press [F1], the function key almost always used to access Help.

  • Microsoft Diagnostics 2.0

    However, instead of a Help screen, MSD would display this humorous comment in a little dialog box.

  • Hid.dll

    In Windows 98, there is a USB related DLL file called Hid.dll. While this file is not an actual program and does not contain a standard, credits type of Easter Egg, there is a humorous comment hidden in the file. To see it you have to locate the file Hid.dll in the Windows\System folder and then open it in Wordpad. As soon as you do, you’ll see this humorous comment in line 6.

By Greg Shultz

Microsoft developers from various development projects hid Easter Eggs in their applications. While the majority of Easter Eggs are designed to give credit to the developers, some are just plain goofy. Let’s take a look.

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By Greg Shultz

Greg Shultz is a freelance Technical Writer. Previously, he has worked as Documentation Specialist in the software industry, a Technical Support Specialist in educational industry, and a Technical Journalist in the computer publishing industry.