The Egg

Heh. I'm listening to a podcast and they are talking about Easter Eggs, those wonderful programming gems the more-industrious of us put in.

Personally, I barely have enough time to get the core stuff debugged, let alone providing special prizes sprinkled everywhere to debug too.

One place I worked at actually had one in one of their products. That was a fun time.

Anyway, one day one of my co-workers was working on some code, and I got involved, and we were noticing all of these if statements scattered all over the place, with seemingly unrelated operations going on, throughout the main algorithms.

Our boss had written most of the system, so curiousity finally got the best of us, and we had to ask.

"Oh that's the Wild One." he said to us, matter-of-fact.

And we're like, "Well what-the-fuck is the Wild One?"

And the story unfolded. He sat back in his chair, smiling.

"Go to the New File command, and enter W-I-L-D-dash-O-N-E for the file name."

It was wild, indeed!

Entering this part name triggered a whole series of random changes and additional behaviors:

• Every character that displayed was assigned a random color.
• Play random tones on the PC Speaker (this was 1987) between each displayed character.
• At key moments, it would "play a little tune" on the PC Speaker.
• When drawing graphics primatives, pixels were assigned random colors.

It was fun for about 60 seconds, then you were done with it. Man, there were a lot of if statements devoted to that one!