New Windows Easter Egg Discovered - And I'm in it!

hey i'm dave welcome to my shop i'm dave plummer retired software engineer for microsoft going back to the ms-dos in windows 95 days and today i'll tell you the breaking news of two new easter eggs that were just discovered or revealed in windows 95 and windows and we'll zoom in real tight on my own name for my own vainglory certification and i'll tell you why i'm in it and why i'm not in the windows 95 one even though i worked on windows 95. that story and the story of the worst email that i ever sent we all have one that we'd like back and this one's mine [Music] so just from a general standpoint you may know that i'm not a big fan of easter eggs at least not in operating systems in fact i've written a ton of shareware in my life and i've never once put an easter egg even in a shareware app why is that i'm just not a fan of hidden payloads so i'm totally cool with if you have an app and you or even an operating system and you want to put credits in it put it in the help about or wherever it appropriately belongs in your operating system don't hide it somewhere that you reveal with some weird you know key sequence to me the reason for that is that users just don't appreciate hidden payloads and for one they're going to be concerned with in the olden days how much space and time has this thing taken up there's one example i believe it was in excel and it was like they i could be wrong on this but as i recall if i had pretty much implemented doom or quake or wolfenstein maybe inside of excel and people were kind of outraged at the time like how much my ram are you wasting here and i think it was all pulled off the disk dynamically so it did take up a little disk space but that's not that expensive the the problem of course is ram and so on and it wasn't using any of that people didn't know that so it kind of gave easter eggs a bad name about that time and i think that was one of the uh there was another one that was also particularly egregious probably around that time and that's when the pushback inside microsoft i think really started to develop to the point where we just couldn't have easter eggs anymore and like i said that that didn't hurt my feelings because i don't think there should be any anyway and why is that as i said if you're running a nuclear reactor do you really want to wonder if there's code in there that's one nice thing about open source you can go look in there and you can see hey there's no credit screens there's no nonsense there's no monkey business um with a closed system you don't have the kind of assurance so i'd kind of like to see well it's not really possible i mean the company could promise hey there's no easter eggs in here but then one that's going to stick something in there even it's harmless and that will invalidate the company's promise and so i imagine that's why they don't make any such promises but there's never been any malicious code it's always just been kind of ego based here's a list of names and the ones in windows that i've seen have been really really simple you may or may not remember it but there was an internet mail client came with the win 95 ie4 in that time frame and the first one that the newest one that's just been discovered that is within that so let's take a look at that one so you need to bring up mail go to help about click on comm control 32 and then type mortimer on your keyboard and you'll get this scrolling list and i know almost none of these people because a they were in a different group 195 working on a different thing male no i know bryce overberger and john ludwig but it's inspired by them not written by them so there you go nothing incredibly fancy list of names didn't crash that's all you asked for right well maybe we'll get to that more the other one that's being featured in the news that's going around and the one that's generated probably the most email to me this weekend and kind of what prompted me to make this video is the anti-four shell update release easter egg that's the one where we took all of the 195 shell code sort of ported rewrote it adapted it for nt to make it suitable for the nt operating system and then gave the code back to 195 and so they backported it so that we all the by then had one code base eventually and i think that was for 198 se perhaps but i'm not sure exactly what version that first shipped in but whatever version it was when they were finally unified was probably when the shell really became high quality and i don't just mean that because oh now we have touched it what i mean is now you've had the two teams go through the code it's portable to two operating systems it's well designed as well implemented handles all the cases and so on and so forth now the nt4 shell update release one is a little harder to trigger i'll post a link in the video description to some text that will explain how to do it all right let's see who we've got here i'll get the flag the people behind the magic have windows nt4 the sir shell update release shell team that'd be me and the other guys there's me there's mark and john and bob and rick those are the basic explorer guys and this is going to go by way too fast for me to tell you what everybody did but these are all the people that worked particularly on the shell update release that was the porting of the 195 code base over to windows nt for nt4 who else is in here let's see what other teams they've got thanks a special thanks to the comfy chair that comfy chair that's a story for a different episode and of course is that the stock ticker or the company it's not clear so one of the questions i get a fair bit is why am i not in the windows 95 easter egg if you know how to bring that one up then you'll sit there and it doesn't matter how long you look at it i will never come up and the reason for that is that i started out initially after i moved from ms-dos and when i went to nt i started in the olay rpc team and we delivered to both win 95 and to windows nt and so by that token i was working on windows 95 but then i moved to the nt shell team before windows 95 actually shipped so i'm not sure the exact dates but i would say three to four months before the actual shipping of 1995 uh or the rtm days i think the code was code already code complete you can't really just move teams when you're in a death march so i'm pretty sure i didn't boot out of there in the last minutes i'm pretty sure we were code complete and done and my stuff was all settled before i went over to the anti-shell team but when i did that now i'm on the nt team so when they take the roster to figure out who's working on what 95 on the ship date i was not so even though i had a fair back of code from the only rpc side in 195 i don't even have a shipment for that thing and i did get invited to the 25th anniversary so there you go oh all part of me i'm just having a drink here from my awesome sauce dave's garage mug check the video description for a link and now about that email that i sent um so when the 1995 team first announced right near shipping that they had done an easter egg somebody on their team i don't know if it was the guy who actually wrote her and i don't know if it was a guy or a girl who wrote the actual easter egg but the guy that sent out the email announcing it was todd and i'll just call him todd todd sends out this email and he's like here's how you trigger the easter egg and i believe if i recall you have to like name a folder with a grid in it and then open it and you get the clouds thing and the names all scroll by well i'm not a big fan of easter eggs as you know and so i was kind of annoyed annoyed they didn't tell us because i was in the shell team on the nt side and they didn't even let us know that this was going in uh not that affected us because we were on the nt side so this only affected 195. so i mean it's their business but so i'm a little frustrated and so i bring a thing up and i'm like ah i'm just kind of annoyed what if i can crash this thing and so i screw around with it for a minute and then i realize each of the crashes is going to divide by zero so i try to scroll or size the window down to where it's super narrow and i get down to zero but you can't if you take a folder window you can only get it down to maybe 160 pixels wide or something doesn't let you go any smaller but if you go into explorer mode where you have the tree pane on the left hand side now you can resize the right hand pane down to zero and i knew this so i tried that and sure enough within like 30 seconds of even starting boom accidents when i actually divide by zero here so to prove my point that easter eggs suck and shouldn't be checked into the product i did reply all to this huge alias that includes all of windows 95 and all of nt and i explained oh well you know if you do this there's a bug because it will crash immediately and this is within you know one or two minutes of his email having gone out and i did this as a reply all i was a young man and uh perhaps working with some deficits on the old social spectrum and uh yeah i'm still learning my way in the world let's just say not something i would do today i would just send a direct email or walk to the guy's office and have a conversation but so suffice to say they fixed the divide by zero bug and so on and so forth and and all was well and harmony and cats and dogs living together oh no wait that's chaos isn't it but i digress why didn't i tell you about this sooner well again uh i don't generally reveal stuff that hasn't been leaked by somebody else somewhere my operating mode is modus operandi something like that the way i generally do things is to wait for somebody else to leak the information and then go explain it properly but i'm not out there leaking a bunch of new information because i respect the nda that i signed so if you're new to the channel this is not a typical video first of all they're generally rehearsed and scripted so i know what the hell i'm saying before i say it and they're generally on windows history or contemporary and retro programming topics so if you're interested in things like the secret history of task manager or the secret history of microsoft bob those are episodes on the channel that you should definitely go and check out and if you already are a fan of the channel don't forget to grab a dave's garage mug well there's no point in rambling i'll get back to work on whatever it is that i do which today actually happens to be the next episode in the software drag racing series which this time is the mac m1 versus the threadripper versus the raspberry pi yes does the pie stand a chance or are its dreams just a little too big you may think you know how that part works out but i'm telling you the m1 versus thread ripper a little weird and confusing be sure to check it out it's the next episode coming up so subscribe to the channel in the meantime in between time i hope to see you next time right here in dave's garage

Channel: Dave's Garage

Views: 111,533

Keywords: windows easter egg, new easter egg, windows 95 easter egg, windows nt easter egg, easter egg, easter eggs, windows 10, windows 98, windows 98 easter egg, windows tricks, windows tips, windows secrets, windows tips and tricks, windows easter eggs, hidden features, windows 10 secrets, dave's garage, easter egg guide, windows 10 tricks, windows 95 easter eggs

Id: vlo5PLOlT6I

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021