| Easter Eggs In Microsoft Products |
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MICROSOFT BEAR The Microsoft Bear is the most famous among the Mascots 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 Appearance s in Windows:
MICROSOFT BUNNY 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. Windows 95 was designed to run on very minimal computing resources even for that time: a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. 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. In the case of the 32-bit Bunny, knowledge of it was actually somewhat useful to end-users. 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. Just like the Bear, the Bunny has an exported function named after him. This time, it's BUNNY_351 in krnl386.exe. MICROSOFT OFFICE 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.
Office 97
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.8 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: #Open a new Excel book. #Go to the File menu and select 'Save As Webpage'. #In the dialog box for Save As, select 'Selection: Sheet' and check the box labeled 'Add Interactivity'. #Click the 'Publish' button (file name is irrelevant). #On the Publish dialog box that appears, simply click the 'Publish' button again. #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). #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). #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: The capitalization present in these sentences are how they appear in the game.
WINDOWS Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 does have a developer credits page, as described Above . Windows 95 Do the following precisely:
If done correctly, this will have the following effects:
The folder doesn't remain special indefinitely. Windows 98 Windows 98 has a credits screen easter egg.9 There are two ways to view it. One involves the Date/Time properties dialog box, but the more straightforward method is listed below: #Create a shortcut to the Weldata.exe program in the C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Welcome directory. #Right-click on the shortcut and open the Properties dialog box. #In the target path field, add the text "You_are_a_real_rascal" to the end of the path (without the quotes). #In the Run field, select Minimized. #After making these changes, double-click on the shortcut and the credits egg should open. 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 . {Link without Title} 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,10 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:
There are several other things in the code of the credits page, including: #The ESC key is trapped, so that if the user presses it, the tab in IE 7 is closed (the user will be prompted.) #There is an image link for ierocks.gif in the upper left-hand corner. It doesn't exist on XP SP2, so only a broken image placeholder is shown.#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.)#You can copy & 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 a semicolon 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 you ask it about its main rival Mozilla - simply type about:mozilla into the address bar and you will see an all blue background. Note: about:mozilla is a well known easter egg in Mozilla and Netscape browsers. HOVER! See Also: Hover! Hover! is a Video Game that came bundled with Windows 95 . It was a showcase for the advanced Multimedia capabilities available on Personal Computer s at the time. It is still available from Microsoft {Link without Title} 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. While the player cannot move your ship or indeed move at all, if the player manages to relocate his or her car through some creative hacking, he or she can view pictures of the developer's heads. The player cannot simply rename and load this level normally; the maze is missing spawns for all other objects and crashes immediately on load. 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 Windows
Microsoft Word Every version of ". 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. {Link without Title} In Microsoft Word 2007 , the repeated sentence is replaced with a longer text: "On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly. To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template." 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.http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datedif.htm NOTES AND REFERENCES
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