4 ms·

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kud

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

keville 9y ago
(Sending some kudos your way, too, having lost many an hour to that Easter egg on otherwise-game-deprived school machines.)
monocasa 9y ago
Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?
- nxc18 9y ago
  Not at MSFT but no. Easter Eggs aren’t worth the security risk of added code. See ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative from the 2000s.
- jasonallen 9y ago
  A dev on my team wrote the following Excel 2000 credits (it was a flying carpet-like game). Afaik that was around the time BillG put his foot down and mandated no new credits. Enterprise customers felt these credits were both a sign of wasted engineering time ("you could have fixed x bugs instead!" and wasted disk space. It's logical, but only partly true. Shipping software on CD means a very long stabilization phase. You couldn't really "fix more bugs" because every bug fix had a risk of introducing another one. That means some Office teams would literally complete their work a year before shipping. They'd sit around half-heartedly helping other teams. That's when someone would take time to write credits. These credits were often tightly-optimized C and assembly, taking very little space. The facts couldn't overcome the optics, so that was the end of fun Microsoft credits.
dTal 9y ago
Ah, HN. I came to comment "anyone remember the Doom engine in Excel 95?" And instead the top comment is "I wrote the Doom engine in Excel 95". Can't top that. Kudos, sir.
ramses0 9y ago
My brain is desperately attempting to recall the sequence of steps to open it. Ctrl + Shift, clicking something in the Help -> About... dialog box, then F5 or something? And/or there was a star-wars scroller in one of other apps, right?
- zeusk 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  I remember the flight sim easter egg in Excel 97, that was certainly unexpected!
daveslash 9y ago
Was the Excel 95' Doom written in VBA or something else?

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

keville 9y ago

(Sending some kudos your way, too, having lost many an hour to that Easter egg on otherwise-game-deprived school machines.)

monocasa 9y ago

Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?

nxc18 9y ago
Not at MSFT but no. Easter Eggs aren’t worth the security risk of added code. See ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative from the 2000s.
jasonallen 9y ago
A dev on my team wrote the following Excel 2000 credits (it was a flying carpet-like game). Afaik that was around the time BillG put his foot down and mandated no new credits. Enterprise customers felt these credits were both a sign of wasted engineering time ("you could have fixed x bugs instead!" and wasted disk space. It's logical, but only partly true. Shipping software on CD means a very long stabilization phase. You couldn't really "fix more bugs" because every bug fix had a risk of introducing another one. That means some Office teams would literally complete their work a year before shipping. They'd sit around half-heartedly helping other teams. That's when someone would take time to write credits. These credits were often tightly-optimized C and assembly, taking very little space. The facts couldn't overcome the optics, so that was the end of fun Microsoft credits.

dTal 9y ago

Ah, HN. I came to comment "anyone remember the Doom engine in Excel 95?" And instead the top comment is "I wrote the Doom engine in Excel 95". Can't top that. Kudos, sir.

ramses0 9y ago

My brain is desperately attempting to recall the sequence of steps to open it. Ctrl + Shift, clicking something in the Help -> About... dialog box, then F5 or something? And/or there was a star-wars scroller in one of other apps, right?

zeusk 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E
ZenoArrow 9y ago
I remember the flight sim easter egg in Excel 97, that was certainly unexpected!

daveslash 9y ago

Was the Excel 95' Doom written in VBA or something else?