< jargon > (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 , and even satellite control 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 ]
(2003-06-23)