|
|
Easter egg: n. [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the U.S. 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, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on
a 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 OSes caused them to
respond to the command make love with
not war?. Many personal computers have
much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers'
names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case)
graphics images of the entire development team.
|
|
