Quiz Of The Week: Easter Eggs

since IT began, the developers and programmers have been having their own little private jokes. They’re called Easter Eggs, and this weekend seemed a good time to celebrate them.

Easter Eggs often surface at Christmas, but as the Easter Bunny delivers your chocolate eggs, join us this week as we look at the secrets hidden inside tech products. We hope the quiz includes at least one or two that you didn’t know!

Secret credits

A lot of Easter Eggs are simply credits – lists of the people who built the system – burned into the circuit boards, or embedded into the software where a secret combination of keystrokes can extract them.

We prefer the in-jokes, even if they do sometimes creak a bit. Old-style command line systems required the user to type in commands with names like  “make” (file creation).  Who wouldn’t want to liven things up by ensuring that some inputs got a funny answer?

But the best Easter Eggs are simply bits of foolishness, added to liven up a dull day at work. Adding pictures to screen icons, or returning more information than users were expecting. These things set up an underground link between the creators and users of the tech, bypassing the marketing and sales people in between.

We love this kind of thing – and have trawled the Internet for our favourite examples. There are plenty more out there, and you can probably find things you didn’t expect in your favourite programs and operating systems.

To start with, though…

Do the quiz!

And, if you like it, try some others!