Finding Easter Eggs in old software

One of most popular secular event in the celebration of the Easter holiday is the hunting of hidden Easter Eggs. Hidden by the Easter Bunny, or the Easter Beagle depending on your beliefs, Easter Eggs can be actual painted boiled eggs, or the little colored empty plastic ones that are stuffed full of goodies.

For years, programmers have hidden little jewels inside of programs. From Castle Wolfenstein levels in Doom to mazes hidden in Excel,  if you know the right keyboard combinations, you can find all sorts of stuff buried inside of programs you use on a daily basis.

Greg Shultz has done a series of photo galleries that show some of the hidden Easter Eggs in Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and some of the Office products. Here’s an Easter Egg hidden in Windows 3.1 featuring Bill Gates.

Officially, Easter Eggs are forbidden in new software.  With 50 million lines of code, you’d think that programmers would have hidden something inside of Windows Vista, but Microsoft says not.

If you want to see even more Easter Eggs embedded in software, check out The Easter Egg Archive. It lists over 5000 Easter Eggs hidden in software and video games as well as thousands more other place.