Easter eggs in Microsoft products

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Some of Microsoft's early products included hidden Easter eggs. Microsoft formally stopped including Easter eggs in its programs as part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002.^[1]

Microsoft Paint

This works in all MS Paint versions. Open Paint, select the paint brush, hold 'CTRL' and press '+' on the numpad side of the keyboard. The paint brush size will increase to the number of times you press the + key. This works with the pencil, brush, spray, text, line, curve and all of the shapes.

Also draw a square (or other shape, text etc), select the shape you have just drawn using the 'Select' tool, click the Transparent tool, hold shift and drag the item around. This works with the pencil, brush, spray, text, line, curve and all of the shapes.

Microsoft Bear

Drawing of the Bear was the icon for some Windows system files

The Microsoft Bear is one famous mascot of the Windows 3.1 (and later Windows 95) team. It was the teddy bear that one of the senior developers on the team used to carry around. He makes several cameo appearances in Windows:

• A drawing of him was used as the icon for the SETDEBUG.EXE and JDBGMGR.EXE system files. The odd icon gave credibility to the jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax, claiming that the files were part of a virus.^[2] See SULFNBK.EXE for a similar hoax.
• Several internal system functions, although having meaningful internal names, are exported from USER.EXE as BEARNNN (where NNN is the ordinal number of the function) in his honor (and to discourage their use from uncautious third party software developers).
• He stars
  

  

  Microsoft Bear appearance in an easter egg
  in two distinct easter eggs in Windows 3.1. The first one^[3] was the reference to a fictitious file named BEAR.EXE, and in the other one^[4] the Bear, along with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Brad Silverberg, presents the email aliases of the Windows 3.1 developers. bradsi, being in charge of Windows production, is listed first (see picture); the three other presenters, billg, steveb, and t-bear, appear together in "Special Thanks", the last section of the list.

Microsoft Bunny

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (June 2008)

During the development of Microsoft Windows 95 the shell developers had several stuffed animals as mascots. One was Bear, who was a hold-over from Windows 3.1. There were two different bunnies as well: the smaller one called 16-bit Bunny and the larger one called 32-bit Bunny. The naming is connected to the fact that Windows 95 was the transitional OS between the 16-bit era of Windows 3.x and the new 32-bit era.^{[citation needed]}

Windows 95 was designed to run on very minimal computing resources even for that time: a 386 with 4 MB of RAM.^{[citation needed]} During the development, it was decided to remove features that drastically affected the performance on these low-end computers. These removed features, along with enhancements to other features and games, went into the Plus! Pack, which had much higher system requirements than the base operating system.^{[citation needed]}

In the case of the 32-bit Bunny, knowledge of it was actually somewhat useful to end-users.^{[citation needed]} These features needed to be turned on while Windows 95 was tested and the secret of turning them on was not removed. Some of the desktop features, including full window drag and anti-aliased fonts, could be turned on by placing the line ILOVEBUNNY32=1 under the windows section in win.ini.^{[citation needed]}

Just like the Bear, the Bunny has an exported function named after him. This time, it's BUNNY_351 in krnl386.exe.

Microsoft Office

Word for Windows 2

• In Word for Windows 2, there is a simple animation involving a WordPerfect 'Monster', a fireworks display and credits roll in the About box. Although simple animation, it was taxing for hardware of the day, and no timing loops were included in the code. As a result, the firework display is too quick to see properly on a 486 or higher machine. It is accessed by:

1. Open a new document.

2. From the Tools menu, click Macro, then select Record Macro.

3. Name the macro SPIFF, and click OK.

4. Again from the Tools menu, select Stop Recorder, then Macro, and click SPIFF.

5. Click Edit, then delete the lines "Sub Main" and "End Sub".

6. From the File menu, choose Close.

7. Click Yes, indicating you want to save the changes.

8. Open the Help menu, then click About Microsoft Word.

9. Click the Word logo icon in the upper-left corner.

Office 6.0/95

• The tip of the day sometimes would display the following fun and inspirational tips. They could also be viewed in the help file.
  • If you do your best, whatever happens will be for the best.
  • Things that go away by themselves can come back by themselves.
  • Plaid shirts and striped pants rarely make a positive fashion statement.
  • You should never dive into murky waters.
  • It's never too late to learn to play the piano.
  • You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors.
  • You should never look directly at the sun.
  • This is the last tip.
• Microsoft Excel contained a hidden Doom-like mini-game called "The Hall of Tortured Souls".^[5]

Office 97

• Microsoft Excel contained a hidden flight simulator - http://www.eeggs.com/items/718.html for accessing directions.^[6][7]
• Microsoft Word contained a hidden pinball game.^[8]

The Word 97 Pinball.

• Microsoft Access contained a hidden simulation of the Magic 8 Ball toy.^[9]

Office 2000

Following in the tradition of hiding a small game in Microsoft Office programs, using Microsoft Excel 2000 and the Microsoft Office Web Components, a small 3-D game called "Dev Hunter" (inspired by Spy Hunter) is accessible.^[10] DirectX must be installed for this to work, and the egg is incompatible with certain service pack upgrades. This easter egg can be activated by performing the following steps:

1. Open a new Excel book.
2. Go to the File menu and select 'Save As Webpage'.
3. In the dialog box for Save As, select 'Selection: Sheet' and check the box labeled 'Add Interactivity'.
4. Click the 'Publish' button (file name is irrelevant).
5. On the Publish dialog box that appears, simply click the 'Publish' button again.
6. Open the .htm file that was created in Microsoft Internet Explorer (it should appear as a blank page with an Excel spreadsheet in the centre- if it doesn't, you likely don't have the Microsoft Office Web Components installed).
7. Scroll to the cell in row 2000, column WC. Align the spreadsheet so this cell is the first cell on the left. Select the whole row, with the cell in column WC sub-selected (it will be white, while the rest of the row will be colored light purple).
8. Hold down the Shift, Control, and Alt keys and left-click on the Office logo (the square composed of puzzle pieces).

The Dev Hunter game should now open. The car can be controlled using the arrow keys, the spacebar fires projectiles, and the 'H' and 'O' keys activate headlights and an oilslick, respectively. Developer credits and humorous sentences appear on the roadway. Interestingly, collisions between the car the user controls and other cars, as well as collisions between the other cars themselves, appear to correctly follow the principle of Conservation of Momentum.

List of Roadway Comments

Note: These sentences are all capitalized in the game.

• WE ARE SPECIAL TOO
• YOU WILL RESPECT THE RECTANGLES
• DONT SKIMP ON THE DATA
• WHAT DO THESE PEOPLE DO AGAIN
• SO YOUR NAME IS MISSPELLED WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT
• CIRCLES ARE GOOD TOO BUT THEYRE NOT RECTANGLES
• PIVOT PIVOT PIVOT CANT GET ENOUGH
• MALICIOUS PIXIES
• A CHART SAYS SO MUCH EVEN THOUGH IT DOESNTREALLY SAY ANYTHING BECAUSE IT CANT TALK
• THANKS FOR SHARING
• LAST BUT NOT LEAST AND ALSO NOT COMPRESSED HAM

Windows

Windows 3.1

Windows 3.1 does have a developer credits page, as described above.

Windows 95

Do the following precisely:

• Right-click on an empty area of the Desktop, and select "New > Folder" from the context menu.
• Type the name of the folder as "and now, the moment you've all been waiting for" (exactly as shown, without the quotes).
• Right-click on the folder, choose Rename; type "we proudly present for your viewing pleasure".
• Right-click on the folder again, choose Rename; type "The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!".

If done correctly, this will have the following effects:

• A file called <Windows install directory>\MEDIA\clouds.mid will be created.
• Click on the folder shortly after creating it, and you will get an animated presentation of the Win95 developers. If you have a working soundcard, the Clouds music will play as the background of the presentation.

The folder doesn't remain special indefinitely.^{[citation needed]}

Windows 98

Windows 98 credits egg

Windows 98 has a credits screen easter egg.^[11] There are two ways to view it. One involves the Date/Time properties dialog box, but the more straightforward method is listed below:

1. Create a shortcut to the Weldata.exe program in the C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Welcome directory.
2. Right-click on the shortcut and open the Properties dialog box.
3. In the target path field, add the text "You_are_a_real_rascal" to the end of the path (without the quotes).
4. In the Run field, select Minimized.
5. After making these changes, double-click on the shortcut and the credits egg should open.

Windows Vista

1. Three images are embedded in the surface of Windows Vista's installation DVD. According to Computing World one is the faces of persons behind the Microsoft's antipiracy team who worked in the hologram.^[12]

Internet Explorer

The Easter egg hidden in Microsoft Internet Explorer can only be displayed in Internet Explorer 4.0; however, the relevant HTML code has been present in all the subsequent versions as well – even though Microsoft "officially" claimed there are no Easter eggs in Internet Explorer 7.^[13]

To view this easter egg in IE4, go into the Help menu and select the "About Internet Explorer" option. Hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard and drag the blue IE logo over the globe icon, then from left to right, pushing the words off of the screen. Click the newly exposed "Unlock" button, which will cause the globe icon to shake. Hold the Ctrl key down again and drag the IE logo onto the shaking globe. The Internet Explorer 4.0 team credits will roll in a new window,^[14] with occasional intermissions containing various in-jokes, such as a reference to the Bear and Bunny (both mentioned above) in the very end of the credits text: "Disclaimer: No fluffy warm creatures were maimed, dismembered, tortured, deplumed, discarded, deflowered, dropped, twisted, wrungOut, extended, respliced, broken, humiliated, irradiated, browbeaten, pickled, deluded, duped, detained, mishandled, desiccated, bronzed, belittled, coddled, expelled, deported, imbibed, elected, marginalized, placated, misrepresented, overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, prepackaged, overly petted, genetically altered or cloned during the making of this product, except of course for Bunny and Bear" (punctuation added for clarity)

To access the credits page in MSIE 5.5 or newer, do the following:

• Open Internet Explorer and type in res://shdoclc.dll/wcee.htm then click Go.
• When it loads, a black page appears. Right click and select View Source - it opens in Notepad.
• Find in this text: gurjPRR. This will find 2 lines of text including If, DecodeStr and return. Highlight and delete them.
• Now save this text file as wcee[1].html
• Open the HTML file you saved, and it will show the credits.^[15]

Alternately, open res://shdoclc.dll/wcee.htm and paste the URL "javascript:void(window.name="TheWCEE")" into the address bar, hit enter, and then refresh the page (F5) and the credits will start without needing to change anything else. However, the easter egg does not work in Windows Vista.

There are several other things in the code of the credits page, including:

1. The ESC key is trapped, so that if the user presses it, the tab in IE 7 is closed (the user will be prompted.)
2. There is an image link for ierocks.gif in the upper left-hand corner. It doesn't exist on XP SP2 or Windows 95, so only a broken image placeholder is shown.
3. You can slow down the text scrolling by searching for the line window.setTimeout( "AnimMoveName(" + iDiv + ");", 0 ); . Change the 0 to a higher value (75 seems to be slow enough to read, though there's a lot of text.)
4. You can copy and paste the entire text by editing the HTML. Search for the lines that read:
   // Disable dragging to prevent the user from selecting text in the tips area.
return false;
   In order to copy the text on the page for reading, place two slashes at the start of the return false line (so that it reads //return false;), which will allow you to right-mouse-click on the page, where you can click Select All and then paste the contents into Notepad.

The entire scrolling text is contained in 20 lines (numbered 0 to 19) of a HashTable. All the developers names are sorted alphabetically by first name.

IE will turn blue if one asks it about its main rival Mozilla - by simply typing about:mozilla into the address bar, one will see an all blue background. Note: about:mozilla is a well known easter egg in Mozilla and Netscape browsers.

The about:mozilla link was disabled in SP2 of Windows XP; however, the file [res://mshtml.dll/about.moz] still exists, for those who wish to re-enable the link add a string value in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs called mozilla with the value res://mshtml.dll/about.moz

Hover!

Main article: Hover!

Hover! is a video game that came bundled with the CD version of Windows 95. It was a showcase for the advanced multimedia capabilities available on personal computers at the time. It is still available from Microsoft^[16] and can be run on all of Microsoft's operating systems released since Windows 95 including Windows Vista.

One level (shown as "small.maz" in the mazes directory of the game) is used as the introduction level shown when the game finishes starting up. If the player presses and holds "Ctrl+Shift+IBMAB" ("Bambi" backwards, "Bambi" was the code name for the project), one can unlock the level and drive around in it. There are pictures of everyone involved with the Hover! project along the maze walls.

Features often misunderstood to be Easter eggs

The following are not Easter eggs, but rather features unexpected to many users of Microsoft products.

See also: Undocumented feature

Microsoft Word

Every version of Microsoft Word from 97 to 2003 contains what is apparently a hidden diagnostic feature: typing =rand() in a Word document and hitting Enter results in 3 paragraphs of 5 repetitions of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Typing =rand(X,Y) (with numbers for X and Y) results in X paragraphs of Y repetitions of the sentence. For example, =rand(10,10) will produce ten paragraphs, each with ten repetitions. Microsoft has officially described this as a feature and not an Easter egg.^[17]

In the Simplified Chinese Edition, the function returns "那只敏捷的棕毛狐狸跃过那只懒狗。" roughly translated "That agile brown fox has leapt over that lazy dog."

In the Traditional Chinese Edition, the function returns the phrase 機會稍縱即逝, roughly translated as carpe diem.

In German it's "Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern.", translated as "Franz is hunting in a completely run-down taxi all through Bavaria".

In Spanish it's "El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi.", translated as "The quick Hindu bat happily ate cardillo and kiwi".

In French it is "Servez à ce monsieur une bière et des kiwis", translated at "Serve this person one (pint of) beer and kiwis".

In Italian it's "Cantami o diva del pelide Achille l'ira funesta", first words in Italian language of Iliad.

In Polish it's "Pchnąć w tę łódź jeża lub ośm skrzyń fig", translated as "Push into this boat a hedgehog or eight boxes of figs". It contains all the polish letters.

In Korean it's "무궁화꽃이 활짝 피었습니다", translated as "Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus--a Korean national symbol) Bloomed brightly".

In Hungarian it's "aAáÁbBcCdDeEéÉfFgGhHiIíÍjJkKlLmMnNoOóÓöÖőŐpPqQrRsStTuUúÚűŰvVzZ. ", the Hungarian alphabet.

In Swedish it's "Flygande bäckasiner söka hwila på mjuka tuvor. Flygande bäckasiner söka hwila på mjuka tuvor" which is meant to test the ability of typists. It contains all the Swedish letters, except q, x and z.

In danish it's "Quizdeltagerne spiste jordbær med fløde", which means: "The quizshow competitors ate strawberry with cream."

In Microsoft Word 2007, the repeated sentence is replaced with a longer text:

When =rand(1,1) is written, only a simple sentence is shown: In Dutch it is «In de galerieën op het tabblad Invoegen bevinden zich items die zodanig zijn ontworpen dat deze bij het algemene uiterlijk van uw document passen.» In English it is «On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document.» In Norwegian Bokmål it is «Galleriene i kategorien Sett inn inneholder elementer som kan tilpasses til dokumentets generelle utseende.» In Norwegian Nynorsk it is «Galleria i kategorien Set inn inneheld element som kan tilpassast den generelle utsjånaden til dokumentet.»

Furthermore, the addition of numbers in the form =rand(X,Y) display different tips according to the (x,y) combination. Example for this =rand(10,1800) will produce 370,000 words on 509 pages.

However on Microsoft 2008 Mac the sentence is the same as the previous Microsoft editions.

On the Japanese version of Word 2008 for Mac, the sentence produced is, "Word for Mac は、画期的な日本語入力・編集環境を実現した「日本語ワープロ」です。" Translating to, "Word for Mac is the ground-breaking Japanese input and editing environment, the realization of the Japanese word processor."

Microsoft Excel

Since version 5, Excel has possessed a "datedif" function, which calculates the difference in whole days, months or years between two dates. Although this function is still present in Excel 2007, it was only documented in Excel 2000.^[18]

Notepad

Notepad uses the IsTextUnicode WinAPI function to recognize the text encoding of a file. This function does some statistical analysis to come up with a guess for the text encoding when special markers defining the encoding are missing. The recognition of a text file as a Unicode file can be triggered by the following:

1. The user enters any combination of symbols in 4 words in the length of 4 characters (first word) - 3 characters (second word) - 3 characters (third word) - 5 characters (fourth word). The words can also be random and, meaningless. (for example, type one of these: "This app can break", "bush hid the facts", "well its the blast" )
2. The file must be saved and Notepad closed.
3. After re-opening the file, the typed letters are interpreted as UTF-16 sequences, resulting in a garbled text with hieroglyphs or rectangles (depending on the font).^[19]

This does not work any longer in Windows Vista.

Microsoft Windows

It is not possible to create a folder called "con" or rename an existing folder to that name. This has been subject to a hoax that claims Microsoft is unable to explain why;^[20] however, this is a known feature as "con" is reserved for device names along with "prn", "aux", etc. One workaround for this is to create the folder using the mkdir command.

Another 'easter egg' that is not really, is the DeskBar feature of Windows 98 Second Edition. The feature was probably hidden because there was not enough time to finish it on time for the release. Right click on the taskbar, and while holding Shift, click properties. There is a new tab, called DeskBar Options. On that tab there is an empty list and three buttons, all 'grayed out'.

Notes and references

• Backstory on Bear and friends. From Raymond Chen's blog "The Old New Thing". Retrieved on September 26, 2005.

See also

• Easter egg
• Windows Vista DVD: Who Are Those People In That Picture?