Microsoft was out early with “easter eggs” – see what was in Windows 1.0

It has become increasingly popular to include a few “easter eggs”, or Easter eggs, in software – for example in the form of some hidden or special lines among hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Available in Windows 1 from 1985

Microsoft’s developers have been doing this for a long time: for example, they did it in Windows 3.0 when they made it possible to display a list of the names of the developers if you minimized all the programs and keyed “win30”, then quickly pressed F3 and Backspace.

It now turns out that Windows 3.0 was not the first time Microsoft tricked such Easter eggs, and that it started already in Windows 1 RTM, the first version of Windows from 1985.

Mentions Gabe Newell

We know this thanks to Lucas Brooks, who discovered a special list of contributors to the development of Windows 1. The list is encrypted in a so-called bitmap file consisting of an image with a smiley face, but Brooks reports that it has been impossible to decrypt the file in 1985 as the tools to do this did not exist at that time.

A well-known name that appears in the list of contributors is Gabe Newell himself, who is now head of Valve. Between 1983 and 1996, Newell worked at Microsoft, where he helped develop both Windows 1 and later versions of the operating system.

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