easter egg
(From the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in
the US and many parts of Europe)
1. A message hidden in the {object code} of a program as a
joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or
browsing the code.
2. A message, graphic, sound effect, or other behaviour
emitted by a program (or, on an {IBM PC}, the {BIOS} {ROM}) in
response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes,
intended as a joke or to display program credits.
One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of
{operating systems} caused them to respond to the command
"make love" with "not war?". Many {personal computers} have
much more elaborate eggs hidden in {ROM}, including lists of
the developers' names (e.g. {Microsoft Windows} 3.1x),
political exhortations and snatches of music. The {Tandy}
Color Computer 3 ({CoCo}) had images of the entire development
team. Microsoft {Excel} 97 includes a flight simulator!
{(http://www.eeggs.com/)}.
[{Jargon File}]
(1999-07-08)