page_title: Easter egg (media)
section_title: Software
hierarchical_section_title: Easter egg (media) / In computing / Software
caption_attribution_description: English: Android Gingerbread Android Honeycomb Android Ice Cream Sandwich Android Jelly Bean Android KitKat Android Lollipop Android Marshmallow Android Nougat Android Oreo Android Pie Android 10
context_page_description: While the term Easter egg has been used to mean a hidden object for some time, in reference to an Easter egg hunt, it has come to be more commonly used to mean a message, image, or feature hidden in a video game, film, or other, usually electronic, medium. The term used in this manner was coined around 1979 by Steve Wright, the then Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure.
context_section_description: In computer software, Easter eggs are secret responses that occur as a result of an undocumented set of commands. The results can vary from a simple printed message or image to a page of programmer credits or a small video game hidden inside an otherwise serious piece of software.
  In the TOPS-10 operating system (for the DEC PDP-10 computer), the make command is used to invoke the TECO editor to create a file. If given the file name argument love, so that the command reads make love, it will pause and respond not war? before creating the file. This same behavior occurred on the RSTS/E operating system, where TECO will provide this response. Other Unix operating systems respond to "why" with "why not" (a reference to The Prisoner in Berkeley Unix, 1977).
  Some versions of the DEC OpenVMS operating system have concealed exit status codes, including a reference to the Monty Python Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook skit; "exit %xb70" returns the message "%SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels" while "exit %x34b4" returns a reference to an early Internet meme: "%SYSTEM-F-GAMEOVER, All your base are belong to us".
  Many personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, or images of the entire development team. Easter eggs in the 1997 version of Microsoft Office include a hidden flight simulator in Microsoft Excel and a pinball game in Microsoft Word. Since 2002, Microsoft does not allow any hidden or undocumented code as part of its trustworthy computing initiative.
  The Debian operating system's package tool apt-get has an Easter egg involving an ASCII cow when variants on apt-get moo are typed into the shell.
  An Easter egg is found on all Microsoft Windows operating systems before XP. In the 3D Text screen saver, entering the text "volcano" would display the names of all the volcanoes in the United States. Microsoft removed this Easter egg in XP but added others. Microsoft Excel 95 contained a hidden action game similar to Doom (1993) called The Hall of Tortured Souls.
  The Google search engine famously contains many Easter eggs, given to the user in response to certain search queries.
  Steve Jobs banned Easter eggs from Apple products upon his return to the company.
  The first Easter egg to appear after his death was in a 2012 update to the Mac App Store for OS X Mountain Lion, in which downloaded apps were temporarily timestamped as "January 24, 1984", the date of the sales launch of the original Macintosh.
caption: Animation showing Easter eggs in Google's Android operating system
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