Happy Easter Eggs !

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This holiday I felt I would not post anything controversial, at least not as controversial as my April Fools Day Post. How many of you knew that your software, DVD Movies, Games and other items have Easter Eggs? Well they do ! Just like any good Easter Egg, you have to hunt for them.

Easter eggs have been cropping up in computer hardware and software for at least a couple of decades now. No one's certain exactly when this practice started. In 1977, Many cartridges for the Atari 2600 game system contained Easter eggs. Early Apple Macintosh and Commodore Amiga's also were known to have some eggs hidden in their system software. Since then, nearly every major operating system and software program has been home to at least one egg. Some companies are strict about putting Easter Eggs in their products and others companies are less strict.

Here is what Bill Gates said in an Interview to New York Times : "We don't mind including credit screens in a product, as long as they don't burn up too much development time or require many resources of the consumer's machine. A lot of work and pride go into creating a software product, and it's understandable that the people involved enjoy getting credit. Unfortunately, the credit list can never be comprehensive because so many people contribute."
Other companies don't have much use for eggs of any kind. Developers at Intuit, say they'd rather spend time fixing bugs than adding eggs. Nico Mak, maker of WinZip, states that his team would rather add more features to the product than waste time with eggs.

Not every egg is simply a scrolling list of programmers. These computer goodies range from a dull, scrolling cast list of the developers to cool, 3D video games. Click here to start exploring some of the best known Easter Eggs, available to date.

And from The Sheriff, let me wish you all a very Happy Easter!

P.S. (see if you can find the Hidden Easter Egg in this post!)