Almost 37 years after the official launch of Windows 1.0, Microsoft’s old operating system has given us a very pleasant surprise. is it a user revealed an easter egg that have remained hidden in software for decades. And although this is not something particularly new for the current times, where the Easter eggs are common in apps, games, series and movies, it was in the mid-1980s.
As Lucas Brooks posted on Twitter (via PCMag), the Easter egg in question consists of a list with the names of everyone who participated in the development of Windows 1.0. The really strange fact is that, among many others, appears Gabe Newell, who worked at Microsoft from 1983 to 1996, when he left the company to found Valve, the parent company of Steam.
Another striking aspect is how the Redmond company has managed to keep this Easter egg a secret for over three and a half decades. Brooks himself has indicated that he does not yet know how he is “naturally” activated, and that he managed to force it to appear after fixing some binaries. What is known is that the list was hidden in a bitmap image representing a smiley face.
And everything indicates that it was not the only Microsoft operating system to include a hidden credit list. Brooks explained that he spent several days reverse engineering other older versions of the software, such as Windows 2.0 and 3.0, with similar results. He even shared a file with the key combinations needed to make them visible; however, unforced access to Easter eggs Windows 1.0 is still a mystery.
Windows 1.0 Secret Easter Egg
As we have already said, today Easter eggs have become a common element of practically all products. However, it is very difficult for them to remain hidden from the public eye for such a long time. On the one hand because we install them in the hope that we will find them, and on the other hand because over the years, it becomes less and less difficult to identify them.
But in the case of Easter eggs of Windows 1.0, it was probably hidden knowing that no one – or maybe no one – would find it. You could think of it as an internal Microsoft resourcemore than something designed to reach a mass audience.
We must also consider that this operating system was the first attempt by those (at the time) led by Bill Gates to make the leap to a graphical user interface. So, it stands to reason that those coming from MS-DOS were more concerned with getting used to the new environment than searching for a hidden list of names.
However, it should be said that the case of Windows 1.0 is not the only one at Microsoft with an Easter egg hidden for years. Last year it was revealed something similar with the original Xbox, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of its launch. At that time, a developer working on the first generation of the video game console pointed to a previously unknown method of seeing the names of everyone involved in the development of the device’s dashboard.
“I decided to share it now because it’s been 20 years, and I thought it would be great to let people know it really exists. […] I also thought that if I didn’t do it now, it would probably never happen.“, had indicated the ex-engineer Xbox.
