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Heard in the halls of Adobe in 1995: In an earlier version of Photoshop, a high-ranking member of the team had snuck in a Halloween easter-egg, but failed to ta

Heard in the halls of Adobe in 1995: In an earlier version of Photoshop, a high-ranking member of the team had snuck in a Halloween easter-egg, but failed to take account of the fact that text encodings for the Japanese version's string resources required two-byte encoding. So, starting at midnight on Oct 31, in most of the world, Photoshop would start up with a "Happy Halloween" alert; but in Japan, it would crash at startup. Whoever did it got fired by the CEO, via phone call in the middle of the night. Any or all details might be wrong...

fortran77 6y ago
Not quite correct. The Easter Egg would change the name of Steve McS———( a QA engineer ) to ‘Steve Bassomatic McS———’ on April 1st. And the person responsible was fired the next day.
- salawat 6y ago
  That's incredibly depressing actually. Someone getting fired over such a minor joke because they didn't run tests related to localization is what is depressing there.
  - zingplex 6y ago
    The fact a QA engineer didn't properly anticipate localization issues with the joke could be indicative of other performance issues.
    - fortran77 6y ago
      The QA engineer was the butt of the joke. Not the implementer.
  - drfuchs 6y ago
    Perhaps you missed the point: An entire country's worth of customers had a product they paid maybe $1,000 for become completely useless all at once, for no good reason. And this was at a time that software came on floppy disks or CDs in shrink-wrap boxes, with updates maybe once a year; no downloading bug fixes over the internet in a few seconds. One can only imagine the cost in dollars and reputation to Adobe, and the pain caused to customers. Even if the fix involves flipping a single bit in the binary, there are days worth of manufacturing (making a new "golden master", duplicating floppies / pressing CDs, typically done by a third-party who may or may not have room in their schedule), boxing and shipping it all, etc. It was huge and avoidable, and due to someone(s) specifically evading the sanctioned flow of production. Think of it more like "Ha ha, after it was QAed, I hacked a picture of my cat into the masks for the new Intel CPU; who knew it would mess up some capacitance and change some critical timing in the barrel-shifter? Oh well, the fix is easy, and all we have to do is send a new chip to everyone."
- drfuchs 6y ago
  Excellent. Glad to know it wasn't completely apocryphal!

fortran77 6y ago

Not quite correct. The Easter Egg would change the name of Steve McS———( a QA engineer ) to ‘Steve Bassomatic McS———’ on April 1st. And the person responsible was fired the next day.

salawat 6y ago
That's incredibly depressing actually. Someone getting fired over such a minor joke because they didn't run tests related to localization is what is depressing there.
- zingplex 6y ago
  The fact a QA engineer didn't properly anticipate localization issues with the joke could be indicative of other performance issues.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    The QA engineer was the butt of the joke. Not the implementer.
- drfuchs 6y ago
  Perhaps you missed the point: An entire country's worth of customers had a product they paid maybe $1,000 for become completely useless all at once, for no good reason. And this was at a time that software came on floppy disks or CDs in shrink-wrap boxes, with updates maybe once a year; no downloading bug fixes over the internet in a few seconds. One can only imagine the cost in dollars and reputation to Adobe, and the pain caused to customers. Even if the fix involves flipping a single bit in the binary, there are days worth of manufacturing (making a new "golden master", duplicating floppies / pressing CDs, typically done by a third-party who may or may not have room in their schedule), boxing and shipping it all, etc. It was huge and avoidable, and due to someone(s) specifically evading the sanctioned flow of production. Think of it more like "Ha ha, after it was QAed, I hacked a picture of my cat into the masks for the new Intel CPU; who knew it would mess up some capacitance and change some critical timing in the barrel-shifter? Oh well, the fix is easy, and all we have to do is send a new chip to everyone."
drfuchs 6y ago
Excellent. Glad to know it wasn't completely apocryphal!