2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Easter egg
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the U.S. and many
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parts of Europe] 1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a
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joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code. 2.
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A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the
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BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes,
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intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known early
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Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond to the command
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make love with not war?. Many personal computers have much more elaborate
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eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political
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exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the
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entire development team.
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