Everybody knows (I suppose) the famous Easter Eggs, pieces of software that, especially in the 90’s, some witty developers placed well hidden into Office Suite best components.
W95 office programs were full of them, and most of us started to understand why W95 crashed so often and why it needs too much memory to run. Easter eggs were so secreted that was impossible to find them using your Excel as usual, like filling cells with numbers and doing calculation. One of them, the so called Flying Simulator, was inserted into Excel, but you can launch it only placing the cursor in a special cell (I300;H350 but I’m not sure), writing a sequence of numbers and parenthesis, transform it into another format and font, and then press Return…magically the grid revealed an old style 3D flying object, in a 3D world made of chops, and you flied into using the arrows buttons. It was immediately clear that the cunnings that made the job was so proud of it that decided to reveal their best performances to the world, starting to suggest how to enjoy the Eggs. It was a blameless joke, someone liked it, some other didn’t, and it was so well hidden that was impossible to find the game, the music, the animation, without a well detailed map.

Easter Eggs are still alive? Well, we can say that things are quite different today. In the past, it was very hard that an Egg appears without your explicit command; nowadays their heiresses are not as fun as the prior, but they could appear without your permission! Have you ever experienced the PowerPoint thrilling feature that closes your presentation whenever you digit a word in a text box and you did the last save about ten slides before and you’re in a hurry to deliver your job? It’s an Easter Egg, of course, but what differentiate it from the past is that you can activate it more easily! And what about the cut and paste into a Word doc, that changes your font, your bullets, the dimensions and takes out a smiley clip that asks “do you need any help?” It’s an Easter Egg too, very fun and easily discoverable, I’m sure that all of you already enjoyed it. Why programmers change their mood? They understand that some silly jokes aren’t powerful enough, so they put in place the master plan…have you ever think about Word, Excel and PowerPoint as some big, very big, very very big…

Why do I blog this?
What do you think that happened to my last PP presentation?