12 ms·

The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8

535 points by luu 5y ago

rendall 5y ago
I love whimsy and Easter eggs in our industry, and I add them whenever possible. There is always a reason to take them out (performance, potential user confusion, grumpy devs, whatever), but prioritizing them says a lot of good about the team and project. In most cases, in my experience, I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Too much effort, too much potential for trouble. Older devs, especially past retirement, almost always like them. This industry started with a sense of humor and fun.
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained. Now I work on systems that have more complexity in their I/O controllers than the devices I had started on, and no-one understands the full stack. When something goes wrong, the whimsy is the first thing that goes out the window in trying to find the root cause.
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    I think that this is the problem. No one understands what is going on. So instead of trying to find the root cause of anything, they add another tool or another layer. And then we have 45 micro services running on a lot of expensive hardware (somewhere) doing less and with worse performance than what we used to do 15 years ago in a monolith on a single server.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > And then we have 45 micro services running on a lot of expensive hardware (somewhere) doing less and with worse performance than what we used to do 15 years ago in a monolith on a single server. And yet, the "expensive" hardware of now is cheaper than your single server from over a decade if you look at the whole picture... a lot of development trends are based on capitalism incentives: - Outsourcing stuff like server hardware management to AWS is 1-3 FTEs less on your payroll, plus saving of datacenter related cost (climate control, UPS maintenance, Internet uplink, redundant equipment/spare parts) - "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers and CI pipelines until it works Good Enough" is yet another saving of specialized expert staff (SysOp / SRE) - "microservices" got popular because it's easier to onboard developers and treat them like disposable cogs if your work packages can be really small, with clearly defined interfaces
      - bluedino 5y ago
        > "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers I saw a script written by a devops employee where they zeroed out all the partitions when they added a new web server.
        Bellyache5 5y ago
        If this web server was running on AWS EC2 with attached EBS volumes then zeroing out a new partition was actually AWS' recommended practice to initialize the disk for performance reasons. EBS no longer requires this. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-initialize.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-init...
        bluedino 5y ago
        These were just plain-jane docker images, but it's interesting that this could be the source of it.
      - hnlmorg 5y ago
        > "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers and CI pipelines until it works Good Enough" is yet another saving of specialized expert staff (SysOp / SRE) There's plenty of us old UNIX greybeards working in DevOps. And frankly in most fields of IT you're going to see your fair share of younger engineers because that's literally how life works: people get old and retire while younger people look for work. Moaning that kids don't know the tech they don't need to know is a little like trying to piss in the wind: you might get some short term relief but ultimately you're only going to soil yourself. edit: It's also funny that you moan about AWS as outsourcing while saying "people don't remember Unix" yet Unix itself comes from a heritage of time sharing services which are the same basic principles of cloud computing. If you're old enough you'll eventually see all trends in computing repeat themselves.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        I know people who were running commercial sites from an average PC in a spare bedroom over ADSL in the early 2000s. A bit graphic design, a bit of PHP, a bit of email management, MySQL, a "pay now" page imported from a payment provider, and they were making good money for a minimal startup cost. All the code written by one or two people, often some external help with the graphics, and sometimes the business concept was someone else's idea. Obviously the services weren't scalable, they didn't have hundreds of millions of users, and they didn't operate globally. But they didn't need to. And that's still true of many startups today. A few of them sold up for large sums.
  - rendall 5y ago
    > Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained. I'm going to disagree, here. Things were as difficult as they ever have been since. Systems and side-effects are better understood only in hindsight. Coding in assembly because higher-order language wasn't invented yet. Coding in a text editor because IDEs were not a thing. Searching linked lists because what's a data-base, not to mention SQL. Needing to keep things lean because 32kb was an ungodly waste. In that light, things are easier than ever. One can be both professional and whimsical. In fact, I'd argue that true mastery will only come with a sense of fun and interest in your craft. Applying whimsy can be an engineering decision. Using 418 when any error code will do, for example, if it affects nothing else.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - patmorgan23 5y ago
      There's like 4 or 5 extra layers of abstraction/frame works in most systems these days.
      - TuringTest 5y ago
        So what? If your tech stack is worth its salt, those layers will be mostly removed at compilation. Reductions in performance often are due to developers mixing up their layers of abstraction and repeating work among several of them, rather than by having several layers adding more powerful abstractions. It's good that a developer has cursory knowledge of how those layers work (e.g. to avoid re-adding checks at the upper layers of something that is already guaranteed by the lower ones), but there's no need to be an expert at all them.
        int_19h 5y ago
        Can you give an example of a tech stack worth its salt by these criteria?
        5y ago
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Amusingly, an easter egg helped in the investigation of a tricky bug recently. The launch path of Twitter’s iOS app logs a “just setting up my twttr” (which is a reference to the first tweet, of course) and it was quite useful in when trying to find the root cause for a particular crash, because the system had silently changed the launch process for apps in an OS update and we could use its presence in the logs to figure out how far along we were in the startup code. (To round out the anecdote, I’m a performance engineer on the younger side, so we’re not all bad :P)
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    Systems were simpler, This is a HN trope that gets trotted out every time a subject like this comes up. It's gone from amusing cliché to just boring and false. Yes, the hardware was simpler. But the knowledge wasn't. For example, when I first started with ray tracing in the 1990's, you used something like Turbo Pascal and had to actually know and understand all of the math behind what you were doing. Today it's just #include some random other person's library and you're off to the races. Today if a developer wants to display a new font, they just add it to the massive tire fire pile of other abstractions they've copied from the internet. Back in the supposedly "simpler" days, you plotted out a font on graph paper, then actually did the math of converting those pixels into bytes for storage and display. And did the extra math to find ways to do it in the most efficient way possible. The knowledge has changed, but the amount of knowledge hasn't. Things are much simpler now than they were then. That's why programmers today think it's OK to waste so much of their computing resources. With the supercomputer power we have in our pockets, this should be a golden age of computing, but instead we use that power to feed people's vanity and addictions. side-effects were better understood and contained. If that was true, then retro computer enthusiasts wouldn't still be discovering features and capabilities today.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      The first web pages I made I had to type into the OG Notepad. And there were no tools to help, and you had to support 3 resolutions + at least 2 browsers. This was before responsive design (or indeed any kind of HTML/CSS design practices) or media queries, so for each page of content I had to write six different pages. There were no guides to help with understanding Netscape vs. IE, no 24-hr tech updates/phones (so you'd take a vacation for a week, IE would update, and you'd come back to sad emails about how the site is broken), etc. Maintenance and upgrading was a nightmare. Luckily, we quickly stopped doing that, but the idea that things were easier back then is because people learned from what we were doing. In 20 years, people will talk about how easy it was to make things in 2022.
    - ajmurmann 5y ago
      I think what you say is true in a way but also gets to the difference between simple and easy. Pulling in a library that does a lot of heavy lifting is definitely easier. The resulting system most likely isn't gonna be simpler though. You are now trying on a lot of code you don't understand and there is probably also lots of code that you aren't even using. This has very little downside to it till something goes wrong. Is it going wrong because you are using the library wrong or because the library has a bug? This isn't gonna be a big deal and gonna be obvious for the majority of cases, but the weird edge cases are gonna be what wakes you up at night.
  - robocat 5y ago
    > Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained. But debugability was far harder, you could not do it remotely, and there was no stackoverflow etcetera to help you. Example: Installed in another country is an embedded controller talking RS232 to devices. The controller is resetting, probably due to a watchdog timeout. The controller software uses a custom RTOS, with no spare hardware timers and it is hard to get logs back, which restricted in size to some kilobytes. You make educated guesses as to what is happening, but are failing. Many weeks of work later, you design your own process profiling technique using a hardware logic analyser and from that you find the root cause. Easily over a man-month of work.
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  > This industry started with a sense of humor and fun. It did, then what the hell happened? :( Like every other industry, the fun is all gone, and the bean-counters and moronic managers have taken control.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Sounds like you need https://imgz.org https://imgz.org
    - Jaruzel 5y ago
      1. The great and infamous Stavros has replied to me ! 2. Why do I need your image hosting program?
      - stavros 5y ago
        1. Hahaha what 2. You don't need it, but you want it
      - the-dude 5y ago
        The fun is somewhere within you. Search and you will find.
        Vinnl 5y ago
        Specifically, by clicking the link, reading it, then clicking around some more.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Jaruzel 5y ago
    Hmm, I'm guessing the bean-counters and moronic managers didn't like me calling them out?
    - LadyCailin 5y ago
- Angostura 5y ago
  Sounds like we need WAAS
  - amelius 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
    - chiph 5y ago
      Clippy's problem was his suggestions were hardly ever helpful or relevant. Today, we could power his suggestions with a fleet of AIs running in over 200 Azure data centers around the globe. Rumors that he would become self-aware are unsubstantiated.
      - ajmurmann 5y ago
        Mankind being eradicated by a self-aware Clippy seems prescient, deserved and a fitting end to the story.
- notjustanymike 5y ago
  The last time I introduced an Easter eggs into a system it made the national news. I tend to stay away from them these days.
  - dzdt 5y ago
    Story time! What was your famous easter egg?
    - notjustanymike 5y ago
      "Newsweek reports on the zombie invasion of New York". I buried a Konami code in the ad integration JavaScript (no one wants to code review that) which flipped all the stories on the homepage for zombie invasion stories. The authors were all members of the dev and project manager teams. You can still Google it. I did not get fired, for a couple reasons. One, I disabled all the ads, so there was no negative brand association. Two, we'd just launched a redesign and our homepage traffic skyrocketed from 45,000 views / day to 750,000 views a day. My personal highlight was receiving a mention on NPR morning edition. My general manager "scolded" me in public, but privately was thrilled at the several hundred thousand dollars worth of free marketing. I figured I'd hang my hat up there.
      - subsubzero 5y ago
        This is awesome, it must be this story then? https://www.forbes.com/sites/firewall/2010/06/15/newsweek-reports-the-zombie-invasion/?sh=662536442283 https://www.forbes.com/sites/firewall/2010/06/15/newsweek-re...
        notjustanymike 5y ago
        That’s the one! A fun two days of my life tracking all the places it popped up. There was a lot of speculation at the time that it was a marketing ploy by the company, which is definitely not the case. Newsweek was a very old school company run by people not good at or willing to understand the Internet. A shame, because the people who reported to them were full of great ideas.
- Minor49er 5y ago
  The closest thing I get to Easter eggs in professional work is leaving references to people or things I like in testing data. Not anything worthy for a spot on The Easter Egg Archive [1], but more plentiful and certainly better than nothing. [1] https://eeggs.com/items/47205.html https://eeggs.com/items/47205.html
  - layer8 5y ago
    I had a coworker who named all the StringBuffer variables "buffy" (as in the vampire slayer). While being a Buffy fan myself, I found this quite annoying.
    - Minor49er 5y ago
      One of my coworkers does this currently with Half-Life references. I add Half-Life references in my own code if I know he's going to be reviewing it
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    I've done this. A long time ago I did QA for a layout product and a lot of the issues were along the lines of "place this square next to this text in this certain way, see the attached screenshot for what it looks like". The square could have been anything but I had a very cute picture of my toddler so I used a photo of them instead. So now somewhere in a database there are hundreds of reports with a picture of my kid in them :)
- pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
  Ah, so that’s where those come from! https://i.imgur.com/mHIvkeQ.png https://i.imgur.com/mHIvkeQ.png
  - glenneroo 5y ago
    Exactly... and even worse, the 404 "bot" laden with whatever garbage my teenage brain came up with at 3am back in the 90s: https://glenneroo.org/404.html https://glenneroo.org/404.html
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      Commodore 64-themed 404: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/404.php https://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/404.php
- mark-r 5y ago
  Microsoft eventually had to remove Easter eggs entirely, because of government contracts that specified there could be no undocumented behavior in their software.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I tried Google, but nothing came up. Do you have a source for this?
    - mark-r 5y ago
      I might have been a little off on the reason, but they really did remove Easter eggs: https://web.archive.org/web/20171123041231/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/10/21/why-no-easter-eggs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171123041231/https://blogs.msd...
      - Lammy 5y ago
        > One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on your computer. Part of that means that there's absolutely NOTHING on your computer that isn't planned. Yeah, like _NSAKEY. Much planned. Very trustworthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
    - kingaillas 5y ago
      No source, just memories from when I was there. As I recall, Brian Valentine sent an email to the Windows division and basically said that easter eggs made the product look bad. Customers don't want to be patching their systems constantly (I was there circa 2000 so in the NT4/2000/XP era, so back when windows update was a website you visited, and the original NT4/2000 bug fix delivery mechanism was the service pack and various rollups) and then also hear it contained easter eggs for funsies. Microsoft also licensed the source out to companies, governments, universities, etc and it wasn't a professional look. Easter eggs in games - that's fine. Easter eggs in your operating system, that licensees could see - not a good look when the previous product (NT4) didn't have a great stability reputation and Microsoft wanted to pursue businesses with new SKUs like Windows Enterprise, Datacenter, with features like clustering. BV recognized programmers wanted to insert a little bit of credit so for Win2000 the easter egg replacement was either a link to a webpage (that listed the names of the Windows team members) or a rolling display of those members. Sorry I can't quite remember which it was... I think it was a link to a webpage to keep as much out of the OS as possible. Remember this was around the time that Excel 97 had an easter egg flight simulator, Word 97 had a pinball game, and Windows NT 4 had one or two easter eggs maybe more (one was the opengl screensaver would 1% of the time draw a teapot at an intersection; the other was a scrolling list of windows team members that I don't remember how it was invoked. So due to this I'm 98% sure what he let into Win2000 was a webpage link). By now, the URL is probably long decayed.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion, but I'm very much against Easter Eggs, at least in SeriousProjects™. Hear me out. When I was younger, I used to find them funny and lighthearted, but after years of having to debug other people's unnecessarily clever code, undocumented code paths, and corners of applications that had absolutely no reason to exist, I've changed my mind. Even though none of what I had to debug were technically Easter Eggs, they were unnecessary, and thus time spent working on/around them was wasted. The best reason to not add Easter Eggs is simply: they add unnecessary (albeit tiny) risk to a project. Technical risk and schedule risk. They are not part of the software's requirements, and they are likely going to be undocumented. Every line of code we add increases risk. Part of our jobs as developers is ensuring every line we add contributes more value than risk. Easter Eggs don't do this. Sorry to be Mr. Serious Raincloud, but please leave Easter Eggs for personal, non business-critical software.
  - cpeterso 5y ago
    > The best reason to not add Easter Eggs is simply: they add unnecessary (albeit tiny) risk to a project. A perfect example from the article: the performance and memory impact on Windows startup due to loading the ASCII cats’ monospace font.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    In well-architectured code, easter eggs are free. Removing them is trivial, but you don't need to because they don't cause problems. They add value, not only because they're great, but because they force you to make your system more extensible than it otherwise would be – but if they break, no harm done. (You might even get bug reports from users, if they stop working! But the users won't mind, because the easter egg isn't why they were using the program.)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
    We all hate debugging unnecessary and pointless code. But over the very LONG TERM projects I see with Easter Eggs tend to have had developers who cared more about the project and were having fun, which leads to an overall higher code quality. (Your own experience may be different).
- voidfunc 5y ago
  > In most cases, in my experience, I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Too much effort, too much potential for trouble. Older devs, especially past retirement, almost always like them. This industry started with a sense of humor and fun. Yea man, because most of us are just trying to get through the career part of our life to money and retire. Save your whimsy for your hobby projects. Nobody wants to debug production code with subtle easter egg behaviors.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    Sooner or later, one person's subtle easter egg becomes another's mission-critical behavior. Speaking solely and strictly for myself, I do not enjoy having to support niche undefined behavior because someone thought it was cute.
  - jorgesborges 5y ago
    You don’t need to invest inordinate time and energy to create cute little things at work. But this is your life! Don’t just “try to get through” parts you don’t like. Enjoy it if you can. You’re not some corporate koolaid-drinking drone if you try to have fun at work.
- plushpuffin 5y ago
  My first programming-related job was for a company that handled instructor evaluations for colleges. The UI we showed to the instructors when setting up their evaluation questions for their students included a demo table showing some fake courses. Rather than something boring like "Calc 101", "Bio 201", etc, I decided to go with themes/settings from the Alien movie franchise, so there was a table like this: > Instructor, Course Name, etc > Ripley, Interstellar Ore Hauling > Ripley, Terraforming 101 > Ripley, Criminal Justice Reform > Ripley, Military Bio-Weapons Projects It stayed up for a few years until my boss made me change it because one of the instructors got confused, complaining that they didn't teach any of these courses.
  - Nition 5y ago
    But using semi-believable generic courses would make that problem even worse!
    - plushpuffin 5y ago
      I don't remember exactly what we did but I think we used even more obviously fake course names like "FAKE COURSE" and "THIS IS A DEMO"
- tomc1985 5y ago
  > I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Oh they do, it's just its more of a preference for some cute thing out of marketing. "Made with love" etc etc
- dhosek 5y ago
  Things were also a lot more innocent in the old days. I created one of the first (if not first) comprehensive TeX archives on the internet by pointing the FTP server on a math department VAX to the actual live application tree that was in use. I never asked permission to do that. Deploying software generally involved just putting stuff in the system directories. And I had open telnet access to all kinds of machines at various institutions. I can't imagine having things that open in the contemporary world.
thriftwy 5y ago
This is when they did the usability disaster, BolgenOS quality Windows 8 which mistaken laptop for a tablet which was something nobody has asked for. Millions of hours of our moms wasted combatting this one.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Man this article is just a bit of fun. Why do you have to be like this?
  - netmare 5y ago
    It's bitterness from having your dreams crushed. I used to read Raymond's blog and share his passion for correctness and efficiency, but it seems like mockery now.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
When I worked on an early SoC with a display on the dev-board, our test software didn't do anything with the display. Depending on the last state of the system, the display usually had a bunch of ugly LCD noise on it. Eventually I got around to implementing a rudimentary framebuffer to send to the display. Wondering what to display, I figured I'd compute a Mandelbrot fractal! People liked it, and I was happy to have made our dev systems a little less ugly. I went to work on other things for a few months. When I came back, they had replaced my fractal with the company logo :\ (I suspect, but don't know the codec, that the jpeg used to store the company logo ended up using more space and cycles-per-pixel than my fractal)
- registeredcorn 5y ago
  Although frustrating and disappointing to hear, that certainly sounds like the perfect sort of opportunity to surreptitiously upload slightly altered versions of the company logo. Slightly mismatched colors. Bassic mispelings. Logo rotated by 4 to 5 degrees. Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame. Etc.
  - futharkshill 5y ago
    > Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame. I have to ask: is this serious or not? While extremely funny, are you guys all working for places where this is not potentially billions in damages?
    - scrumbledober 5y ago
      Sounds like it was only on dev boards, not going out to production.
      - admax88qqq 5y ago
        Dev work often finds curious ways to production.
      - junon 5y ago
mjg59 5y ago
I can only aspire to this level of beautiful whimsy - it's unfortunate that it triggered a codepath that could be measured, because that is by far the easiest excuse to remove something beautiful and rarely seen. The closest I've managed is: $ grep -o --text U+1F4A9 vmlinux U+1F4A9 and while there may be an argument that this is whimsical, I don't think there's an argument that it's beautiful. (U+1F4A9 should be the literal Unicode PILE OF POO glyph, but HN strips it, so)
- stavros 5y ago
  But those bytes could randomly be in anything, doesn't mean they're interpreted as Unicode, no?
  - mjg59 5y ago
    Oh absolutely - as far as the code is concerned they're just bytes, the fact that interpreting them as UTF-8 is entertaining is not something the kernel cares about at all.
    - stavros 5y ago
      Ah OK, I thought it was implying that the kernel displayed a pile of poo somewhere.
- mjg59 5y ago
  Although the fact that I've since encoded the "UUID" that this is contained within into other codebases such that Linux can't remove it without breaking some deployed u-boot builds is definitely something I'm proud of.
  - Jaruzel 5y ago
    Your mention of UUID, reminded me that the GUIDs for Microsoft office products in the Windows Registry all end with '0FF1CE' - that's a nice Easter egg I think that doesn't impact anything.
k_sze 5y ago
Are we sure those cats aren't Luna and Artemis from Sailor Moon?
- Mezzie 5y ago
  It's more likely to be a reference to Goodnight Moon. The book has cats at the end saying 'Goodnight, Moon!' Also there is no point in the series where Luna and Artemis actually stare at the moon together in this fashion, and the cat on the left is wearing a collar. Neither Luna nor Artemis is collared. ... I was a six year old girl when Sailor Moon premiered in America. I know WAY too much about that show.
  - k_sze 5y ago
    Haha. I’m a guy and used to watch Sailor Moon with one of my best friends (also a guy) back in university.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      Good TV is good TV!
wzeyiseggmind_ 5y ago
That's a good way of knowing if the shell is running Too bad it was removed
jpgvm 5y ago
TIL: Performance team are a bunch of heartless cat haters. /s These sorts of articles are awesome though. I love hearing all the stories that go on behind the scenes of huge projects like this that otherwise never see the light of day.
- registeredcorn 5y ago
  If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out the NCommander's video talking about Space Cadet Pinball. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw He references the same blog, and goes into some pretty incredible detail about the history of what happened to pinball coming pre-installed on Windows.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
And comments are closed so you can't ask where jgs's signature is to credit her where both the original MS developer and this blogger neglected to.
wffurr 5y ago
Somewhere there is a Windows shell programmer who debugged one too many "not even a crash" shell issues. He's got a 1000 yard stare and all he can say about it is he "saw the cats". Seeing a cat on a fence to this day stops him cold.
aasasd 5y ago
You'd think that Win used Unicode fonts by that time, and surely some mono-width replacement characters can be found in Unicode.
makach 5y ago
ahaha, excellent. I wrote a similar script, displaying on my terminal a cat looking over a fence, eyes flicking from side to side waiting for a certain web-service to become available in which the cat would be gone. the waiting game is real for most developers/coders.
rob74 5y ago
I always thought these "two cats sitting on a fence" scenes were inspired by Garfield (e.g. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/garfield/images/d/d5/2010-04-18.gif/revision/latest?cb=20191223020001 https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/garfield/images/d/d5/2010-...), but maybe Garfield based that on something even older?
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Pretty sure I've seen it done in some classic Tom and Jerry.
- DoctorOW 5y ago
  I thought that was a behavior cats just exhibit in real life. In my apartment, there's a gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling. My cat frequently climbs up there. Pretty easy to imagine he'd do the same thing on fences were he outside.
throwawayninja 5y ago
> You see, ASCII art uses a monospace font, and the cats screen was the only part of the startup sequence that used a monospace font. Drawing the backstop window was forcing the rasterization of an entirely new font, which was costing time and memory for something that shouldn’t ever be seen in the first place. Wow, I never thought an entire operating system could be crippled by font load times. Must be a problem I'm too linux & vector font to understand.
- forbiddenlake 5y ago
  The article makes no mention of crippling the entire operating system. "costing time and memory" can be true without implying a large magnitude.
- junon 5y ago
  Most fonts are vector, except for bitmap fonts which are typically only used in BIOS/VESA output. Not sure what the brag is here.
opminion 5y ago
The local newspaper I read as a kid used pictures of cats, presumably to fill empty space.
TuringTest 5y ago
Younglings may not remember, but Mozilla browser used to include a kitchen sink[1], as a joke on the number of functions that were added to it as an internet suite beyond being just a browser[2]. [1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/kitchensink.xml https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/k... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122411 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122411
- Melatonic 5y ago
  I wish they left this shit in
  - sebazzz 5y ago
    There is still about:robots though, which has been maintained and updated in the new style over the years. And of course, about:mozilla is still present.[0] [0]: The Beast continued its studies with renewed Focus, building great Reference works and contemplating new Realities. The Beast brought forth its followers and acolytes to create a renewed smaller form of itself and, through Mischievous means, sent it out across the world. from The Book of Mozilla, 6
mark-r 5y ago
I'll bet if you rendered those screens as 2-color GIFs, the compression would make them similar in size to the ASCII text. Then you wouldn't need fonts.
Melatonic 5y ago
I really hated windows 8 and if they had left this cat shit in I would have felt a lot better
johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
It's great to see there are real human beings with passion and interests are developing Windows at MS. Whereas Google has no human face. People have their accounts closed and don't get any response from a human being on a support forum.
- tonmoy 5y ago
  I fail to see how an Easter egg absolves MS of not-being-human. If we took stock, Google probably would have more Easter eggs.
scubbo 5y ago
Fun! In one of my early roles, there was a script passed named `cat-art` that includes some images that are presumably references to this - see https://pastebin.com/hhv0nXsm https://pastebin.com/hhv0nXsm
- Sniffnoy 5y ago
  References to this, or drawing from the same souce as it? The comment about "jgs" would suggest the latter.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Kinda shitty they seem to have cut out her signature.
  - ramses0 5y ago
    jgs- relatively a heavyweight in the world of ascii art. https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/dolphins https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/dolphins I usually put a random ascii art animal in the `motd` of random servers that I work with, and have seen tons of pieces with a “jgs” sig.
- laumars 5y ago
  …or a Microsoft engineer used that existing cat art. I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    > I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen. It's something to doodle while waiting for the compiler I reckon. I can't imagine OS development to be a fast iterative process.
    - laumars 5y ago
      I can’t imagine ASCII art to be the quickest thing to doodle. But that aside, someone else has now linked to the source and it wasn’t MS.
fsckboy 5y ago
you can make ascii art with a variable pitch font, you only have to do it once and it's static after that, use a font that was going to be rendered anyway.
jabbany 5y ago
Huh, reading the first half I almost expected them to have a debugging system where the cats on the fence were composited by each layer drawing only part of the scene on top of things below (fence, then one cat, then the other etc.) so you'd see different things if different parts failed. Plenty cute though.
- p_l 5y ago
  AFAIK SAGE computers had diagnostic programs that were written in such way that they drew a "pinup girl" on the console (there supposedly was another, more risque animated image too). If there was a malfunction, the graphics would be malformed.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Ah, the times when toxic masculinity was accepted in the workplace...
    - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      What?
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    The full story and a photo of the display: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-never-before-told-story-of-the-worlds-first-computer-art-its-a-sexy-dame/267439/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-n...
- exikyut 5y ago
  This sort of strategy feels to me* like it would be ideal in a gamedev sort of environment - considering the nontrivial practical distance between each of the layers in this scenario, I can totally see each layer occasionally showing up out of alignment, or rendered in the wrong font, etc. My (very abstract and non-practical) impression is that the rendering pipeline in a game is typically much tighter/cohesive than an entire desktop shell. * I could be wrong; I'm just spouting naive hot air with no practical experience at either end of this spectrum :)
ComputerGuru 5y ago
> You see, ASCII art uses a monospace font, and the cats screen was the only part of the startup sequence that used a monospace font. But iirc, Windows 8 introduced Segoe Mono and the kernel text mode interface is/was using that font, too?
- laumars 5y ago
  Microsoft likely didn’t create that art. So I suspect a bigger reason for removing it was licensing, with “optimisation” being a strong excuse for not spending resource on creating original assets.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    Joan G Stark
- fredoralive 5y ago
  The kernel text mode font is probably baked into the kernel and not accessible from user space / Win32?
- exikyut 5y ago
  I *think* this was part of the shell layer. Which is why it's fascinating how the performance team wanted to prune it out; presumably the fonts were mapped into memory elsewhere and thus deduplic...oh, maybe Windows doesn't have mmap page dedupe.
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    Edit: I don't think the kernel would render TTF and/or use the full graphical stak so that's probably the main difference It probably has, but maybe not between kernel and userspace
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      > Edit: I don't think the kernel would render TTF and/or use the full graphical stak so that's probably the main difference Oh but it does. Most (all?) text rendering on Windows happens in the kernel.
exikyut 5y ago
I'm pretty sure I've seen jgs in other ASCII art elsewhere.
- bonergarage 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Stark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Stark > Joan G. Stark, also known by her pseudonym Spunk or her initials jgs, is an American ASCII artist. See ‘cats on a fence 8/98’ for the missing risqué frames: https://web.archive.org/web/20091028023559/http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/pets.htm#cats https://web.archive.org/web/20091028023559/http://www.geocit...
  - Wang0618 5y ago
    Here is a more relative one: https://web.archive.org/web/20000307060602/http://geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/6446/cats.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20000307060602/http://geocities.... Once, I collected some ascii art and made a online gallery (https://ascii-art.pywebio.online/#0_joan_stark.cat_love https://ascii-art.pywebio.online/#0_joan_stark.cat_love), "cats on a fence " is one of them

535 points by luu 5y ago

I love whimsy and Easter eggs in our industry, and I add them whenever possible. There is always a reason to take them out (performance, potential user confusion, grumpy devs, whatever), but prioritizing them says a lot of good about the team and project. In most cases, in my experience, I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Too much effort, too much potential for trouble. Older devs, especially past retirement, almost always like them. This industry started with a sense of humor and fun.

AceJohnny2 5y ago
Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained. Now I work on systems that have more complexity in their I/O controllers than the devices I had started on, and no-one understands the full stack. When something goes wrong, the whimsy is the first thing that goes out the window in trying to find the root cause.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  I think that this is the problem. No one understands what is going on. So instead of trying to find the root cause of anything, they add another tool or another layer. And then we have 45 micro services running on a lot of expensive hardware (somewhere) doing less and with worse performance than what we used to do 15 years ago in a monolith on a single server.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > And then we have 45 micro services running on a lot of expensive hardware (somewhere) doing less and with worse performance than what we used to do 15 years ago in a monolith on a single server. And yet, the "expensive" hardware of now is cheaper than your single server from over a decade if you look at the whole picture... a lot of development trends are based on capitalism incentives: - Outsourcing stuff like server hardware management to AWS is 1-3 FTEs less on your payroll, plus saving of datacenter related cost (climate control, UPS maintenance, Internet uplink, redundant equipment/spare parts) - "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers and CI pipelines until it works Good Enough" is yet another saving of specialized expert staff (SysOp / SRE) - "microservices" got popular because it's easier to onboard developers and treat them like disposable cogs if your work packages can be really small, with clearly defined interfaces
    - bluedino 5y ago
      > "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers I saw a script written by a devops employee where they zeroed out all the partitions when they added a new web server.
      - Bellyache5 5y ago
        If this web server was running on AWS EC2 with attached EBS volumes then zeroing out a new partition was actually AWS' recommended practice to initialize the disk for performance reasons. EBS no longer requires this. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-initialize.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-init...
        bluedino 5y ago
        These were just plain-jane docker images, but it's interesting that this could be the source of it.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      > "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers and CI pipelines until it works Good Enough" is yet another saving of specialized expert staff (SysOp / SRE) There's plenty of us old UNIX greybeards working in DevOps. And frankly in most fields of IT you're going to see your fair share of younger engineers because that's literally how life works: people get old and retire while younger people look for work. Moaning that kids don't know the tech they don't need to know is a little like trying to piss in the wind: you might get some short term relief but ultimately you're only going to soil yourself. edit: It's also funny that you moan about AWS as outsourcing while saying "people don't remember Unix" yet Unix itself comes from a heritage of time sharing services which are the same basic principles of cloud computing. If you're old enough you'll eventually see all trends in computing repeat themselves.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      I know people who were running commercial sites from an average PC in a spare bedroom over ADSL in the early 2000s. A bit graphic design, a bit of PHP, a bit of email management, MySQL, a "pay now" page imported from a payment provider, and they were making good money for a minimal startup cost. All the code written by one or two people, often some external help with the graphics, and sometimes the business concept was someone else's idea. Obviously the services weren't scalable, they didn't have hundreds of millions of users, and they didn't operate globally. But they didn't need to. And that's still true of many startups today. A few of them sold up for large sums.
- rendall 5y ago
  > Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained. I'm going to disagree, here. Things were as difficult as they ever have been since. Systems and side-effects are better understood only in hindsight. Coding in assembly because higher-order language wasn't invented yet. Coding in a text editor because IDEs were not a thing. Searching linked lists because what's a data-base, not to mention SQL. Needing to keep things lean because 32kb was an ungodly waste. In that light, things are easier than ever. One can be both professional and whimsical. In fact, I'd argue that true mastery will only come with a sense of fun and interest in your craft. Applying whimsy can be an engineering decision. Using 418 when any error code will do, for example, if it affects nothing else.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - patmorgan23 5y ago
    There's like 4 or 5 extra layers of abstraction/frame works in most systems these days.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      So what? If your tech stack is worth its salt, those layers will be mostly removed at compilation. Reductions in performance often are due to developers mixing up their layers of abstraction and repeating work among several of them, rather than by having several layers adding more powerful abstractions. It's good that a developer has cursory knowledge of how those layers work (e.g. to avoid re-adding checks at the upper layers of something that is already guaranteed by the lower ones), but there's no need to be an expert at all them.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        Can you give an example of a tech stack worth its salt by these criteria?
        5y ago
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Amusingly, an easter egg helped in the investigation of a tricky bug recently. The launch path of Twitter’s iOS app logs a “just setting up my twttr” (which is a reference to the first tweet, of course) and it was quite useful in when trying to find the root cause for a particular crash, because the system had silently changed the launch process for apps in an OS update and we could use its presence in the logs to figure out how far along we were in the startup code. (To round out the anecdote, I’m a performance engineer on the younger side, so we’re not all bad :P)
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Systems were simpler, This is a HN trope that gets trotted out every time a subject like this comes up. It's gone from amusing cliché to just boring and false. Yes, the hardware was simpler. But the knowledge wasn't. For example, when I first started with ray tracing in the 1990's, you used something like Turbo Pascal and had to actually know and understand all of the math behind what you were doing. Today it's just #include some random other person's library and you're off to the races. Today if a developer wants to display a new font, they just add it to the massive tire fire pile of other abstractions they've copied from the internet. Back in the supposedly "simpler" days, you plotted out a font on graph paper, then actually did the math of converting those pixels into bytes for storage and display. And did the extra math to find ways to do it in the most efficient way possible. The knowledge has changed, but the amount of knowledge hasn't. Things are much simpler now than they were then. That's why programmers today think it's OK to waste so much of their computing resources. With the supercomputer power we have in our pockets, this should be a golden age of computing, but instead we use that power to feed people's vanity and addictions. side-effects were better understood and contained. If that was true, then retro computer enthusiasts wouldn't still be discovering features and capabilities today.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    The first web pages I made I had to type into the OG Notepad. And there were no tools to help, and you had to support 3 resolutions + at least 2 browsers. This was before responsive design (or indeed any kind of HTML/CSS design practices) or media queries, so for each page of content I had to write six different pages. There were no guides to help with understanding Netscape vs. IE, no 24-hr tech updates/phones (so you'd take a vacation for a week, IE would update, and you'd come back to sad emails about how the site is broken), etc. Maintenance and upgrading was a nightmare. Luckily, we quickly stopped doing that, but the idea that things were easier back then is because people learned from what we were doing. In 20 years, people will talk about how easy it was to make things in 2022.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    I think what you say is true in a way but also gets to the difference between simple and easy. Pulling in a library that does a lot of heavy lifting is definitely easier. The resulting system most likely isn't gonna be simpler though. You are now trying on a lot of code you don't understand and there is probably also lots of code that you aren't even using. This has very little downside to it till something goes wrong. Is it going wrong because you are using the library wrong or because the library has a bug? This isn't gonna be a big deal and gonna be obvious for the majority of cases, but the weird edge cases are gonna be what wakes you up at night.
- robocat 5y ago
  > Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained. But debugability was far harder, you could not do it remotely, and there was no stackoverflow etcetera to help you. Example: Installed in another country is an embedded controller talking RS232 to devices. The controller is resetting, probably due to a watchdog timeout. The controller software uses a custom RTOS, with no spare hardware timers and it is hard to get logs back, which restricted in size to some kilobytes. You make educated guesses as to what is happening, but are failing. Many weeks of work later, you design your own process profiling technique using a hardware logic analyser and from that you find the root cause. Easily over a man-month of work.
Jaruzel 5y ago
> This industry started with a sense of humor and fun. It did, then what the hell happened? :( Like every other industry, the fun is all gone, and the bean-counters and moronic managers have taken control.
- stavros 5y ago
  Sounds like you need https://imgz.org https://imgz.org
  - Jaruzel 5y ago
    1. The great and infamous Stavros has replied to me ! 2. Why do I need your image hosting program?
    - stavros 5y ago
      1. Hahaha what 2. You don't need it, but you want it
    - the-dude 5y ago
      The fun is somewhere within you. Search and you will find.
      - Vinnl 5y ago
        Specifically, by clicking the link, reading it, then clicking around some more.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  Hmm, I'm guessing the bean-counters and moronic managers didn't like me calling them out?
  - LadyCailin 5y ago
Angostura 5y ago
Sounds like we need WAAS
- amelius 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
  - chiph 5y ago
    Clippy's problem was his suggestions were hardly ever helpful or relevant. Today, we could power his suggestions with a fleet of AIs running in over 200 Azure data centers around the globe. Rumors that he would become self-aware are unsubstantiated.
    - ajmurmann 5y ago
      Mankind being eradicated by a self-aware Clippy seems prescient, deserved and a fitting end to the story.
notjustanymike 5y ago
The last time I introduced an Easter eggs into a system it made the national news. I tend to stay away from them these days.
- dzdt 5y ago
  Story time! What was your famous easter egg?
  - notjustanymike 5y ago
    "Newsweek reports on the zombie invasion of New York". I buried a Konami code in the ad integration JavaScript (no one wants to code review that) which flipped all the stories on the homepage for zombie invasion stories. The authors were all members of the dev and project manager teams. You can still Google it. I did not get fired, for a couple reasons. One, I disabled all the ads, so there was no negative brand association. Two, we'd just launched a redesign and our homepage traffic skyrocketed from 45,000 views / day to 750,000 views a day. My personal highlight was receiving a mention on NPR morning edition. My general manager "scolded" me in public, but privately was thrilled at the several hundred thousand dollars worth of free marketing. I figured I'd hang my hat up there.
    - subsubzero 5y ago
      This is awesome, it must be this story then? https://www.forbes.com/sites/firewall/2010/06/15/newsweek-reports-the-zombie-invasion/?sh=662536442283 https://www.forbes.com/sites/firewall/2010/06/15/newsweek-re...
      - notjustanymike 5y ago
        That’s the one! A fun two days of my life tracking all the places it popped up. There was a lot of speculation at the time that it was a marketing ploy by the company, which is definitely not the case. Newsweek was a very old school company run by people not good at or willing to understand the Internet. A shame, because the people who reported to them were full of great ideas.
Minor49er 5y ago
The closest thing I get to Easter eggs in professional work is leaving references to people or things I like in testing data. Not anything worthy for a spot on The Easter Egg Archive [1], but more plentiful and certainly better than nothing. [1] https://eeggs.com/items/47205.html https://eeggs.com/items/47205.html
- layer8 5y ago
  I had a coworker who named all the StringBuffer variables "buffy" (as in the vampire slayer). While being a Buffy fan myself, I found this quite annoying.
  - Minor49er 5y ago
    One of my coworkers does this currently with Half-Life references. I add Half-Life references in my own code if I know he's going to be reviewing it
- bentcorner 5y ago
  I've done this. A long time ago I did QA for a layout product and a lot of the issues were along the lines of "place this square next to this text in this certain way, see the attached screenshot for what it looks like". The square could have been anything but I had a very cute picture of my toddler so I used a photo of them instead. So now somewhere in a database there are hundreds of reports with a picture of my kid in them :)
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
Ah, so that’s where those come from! https://i.imgur.com/mHIvkeQ.png https://i.imgur.com/mHIvkeQ.png
- glenneroo 5y ago
  Exactly... and even worse, the 404 "bot" laden with whatever garbage my teenage brain came up with at 3am back in the 90s: https://glenneroo.org/404.html https://glenneroo.org/404.html
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    Commodore 64-themed 404: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/404.php https://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/404.php
mark-r 5y ago
Microsoft eventually had to remove Easter eggs entirely, because of government contracts that specified there could be no undocumented behavior in their software.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I tried Google, but nothing came up. Do you have a source for this?
  - mark-r 5y ago
    I might have been a little off on the reason, but they really did remove Easter eggs: https://web.archive.org/web/20171123041231/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/10/21/why-no-easter-eggs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171123041231/https://blogs.msd...
    - Lammy 5y ago
      > One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on your computer. Part of that means that there's absolutely NOTHING on your computer that isn't planned. Yeah, like _NSAKEY. Much planned. Very trustworthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
  - kingaillas 5y ago
    No source, just memories from when I was there. As I recall, Brian Valentine sent an email to the Windows division and basically said that easter eggs made the product look bad. Customers don't want to be patching their systems constantly (I was there circa 2000 so in the NT4/2000/XP era, so back when windows update was a website you visited, and the original NT4/2000 bug fix delivery mechanism was the service pack and various rollups) and then also hear it contained easter eggs for funsies. Microsoft also licensed the source out to companies, governments, universities, etc and it wasn't a professional look. Easter eggs in games - that's fine. Easter eggs in your operating system, that licensees could see - not a good look when the previous product (NT4) didn't have a great stability reputation and Microsoft wanted to pursue businesses with new SKUs like Windows Enterprise, Datacenter, with features like clustering. BV recognized programmers wanted to insert a little bit of credit so for Win2000 the easter egg replacement was either a link to a webpage (that listed the names of the Windows team members) or a rolling display of those members. Sorry I can't quite remember which it was... I think it was a link to a webpage to keep as much out of the OS as possible. Remember this was around the time that Excel 97 had an easter egg flight simulator, Word 97 had a pinball game, and Windows NT 4 had one or two easter eggs maybe more (one was the opengl screensaver would 1% of the time draw a teapot at an intersection; the other was a scrolling list of windows team members that I don't remember how it was invoked. So due to this I'm 98% sure what he let into Win2000 was a webpage link). By now, the URL is probably long decayed.
ryandrake 5y ago
Unpopular opinion, but I'm very much against Easter Eggs, at least in SeriousProjects™. Hear me out. When I was younger, I used to find them funny and lighthearted, but after years of having to debug other people's unnecessarily clever code, undocumented code paths, and corners of applications that had absolutely no reason to exist, I've changed my mind. Even though none of what I had to debug were technically Easter Eggs, they were unnecessary, and thus time spent working on/around them was wasted. The best reason to not add Easter Eggs is simply: they add unnecessary (albeit tiny) risk to a project. Technical risk and schedule risk. They are not part of the software's requirements, and they are likely going to be undocumented. Every line of code we add increases risk. Part of our jobs as developers is ensuring every line we add contributes more value than risk. Easter Eggs don't do this. Sorry to be Mr. Serious Raincloud, but please leave Easter Eggs for personal, non business-critical software.
- cpeterso 5y ago
  > The best reason to not add Easter Eggs is simply: they add unnecessary (albeit tiny) risk to a project. A perfect example from the article: the performance and memory impact on Windows startup due to loading the ASCII cats’ monospace font.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  In well-architectured code, easter eggs are free. Removing them is trivial, but you don't need to because they don't cause problems. They add value, not only because they're great, but because they force you to make your system more extensible than it otherwise would be – but if they break, no harm done. (You might even get bug reports from users, if they stop working! But the users won't mind, because the easter egg isn't why they were using the program.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
  We all hate debugging unnecessary and pointless code. But over the very LONG TERM projects I see with Easter Eggs tend to have had developers who cared more about the project and were having fun, which leads to an overall higher code quality. (Your own experience may be different).
voidfunc 5y ago
> In most cases, in my experience, I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Too much effort, too much potential for trouble. Older devs, especially past retirement, almost always like them. This industry started with a sense of humor and fun. Yea man, because most of us are just trying to get through the career part of our life to money and retire. Save your whimsy for your hobby projects. Nobody wants to debug production code with subtle easter egg behaviors.
- Kalium 5y ago
  Sooner or later, one person's subtle easter egg becomes another's mission-critical behavior. Speaking solely and strictly for myself, I do not enjoy having to support niche undefined behavior because someone thought it was cute.
- jorgesborges 5y ago
  You don’t need to invest inordinate time and energy to create cute little things at work. But this is your life! Don’t just “try to get through” parts you don’t like. Enjoy it if you can. You’re not some corporate koolaid-drinking drone if you try to have fun at work.
plushpuffin 5y ago
My first programming-related job was for a company that handled instructor evaluations for colleges. The UI we showed to the instructors when setting up their evaluation questions for their students included a demo table showing some fake courses. Rather than something boring like "Calc 101", "Bio 201", etc, I decided to go with themes/settings from the Alien movie franchise, so there was a table like this: > Instructor, Course Name, etc > Ripley, Interstellar Ore Hauling > Ripley, Terraforming 101 > Ripley, Criminal Justice Reform > Ripley, Military Bio-Weapons Projects It stayed up for a few years until my boss made me change it because one of the instructors got confused, complaining that they didn't teach any of these courses.
- Nition 5y ago
  But using semi-believable generic courses would make that problem even worse!
  - plushpuffin 5y ago
    I don't remember exactly what we did but I think we used even more obviously fake course names like "FAKE COURSE" and "THIS IS A DEMO"
tomc1985 5y ago
> I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Oh they do, it's just its more of a preference for some cute thing out of marketing. "Made with love" etc etc
dhosek 5y ago
Things were also a lot more innocent in the old days. I created one of the first (if not first) comprehensive TeX archives on the internet by pointing the FTP server on a math department VAX to the actual live application tree that was in use. I never asked permission to do that. Deploying software generally involved just putting stuff in the system directories. And I had open telnet access to all kinds of machines at various institutions. I can't imagine having things that open in the contemporary world.

thriftwy 5y ago

This is when they did the usability disaster, BolgenOS quality Windows 8 which mistaken laptop for a tablet which was something nobody has asked for. Millions of hours of our moms wasted combatting this one.

mdoms 5y ago
Man this article is just a bit of fun. Why do you have to be like this?
- netmare 5y ago
  It's bitterness from having your dreams crushed. I used to read Raymond's blog and share his passion for correctness and efficiency, but it seems like mockery now.

AceJohnny2 5y ago

When I worked on an early SoC with a display on the dev-board, our test software didn't do anything with the display. Depending on the last state of the system, the display usually had a bunch of ugly LCD noise on it. Eventually I got around to implementing a rudimentary framebuffer to send to the display. Wondering what to display, I figured I'd compute a Mandelbrot fractal! People liked it, and I was happy to have made our dev systems a little less ugly. I went to work on other things for a few months. When I came back, they had replaced my fractal with the company logo :\ (I suspect, but don't know the codec, that the jpeg used to store the company logo ended up using more space and cycles-per-pixel than my fractal)

registeredcorn 5y ago
Although frustrating and disappointing to hear, that certainly sounds like the perfect sort of opportunity to surreptitiously upload slightly altered versions of the company logo. Slightly mismatched colors. Bassic mispelings. Logo rotated by 4 to 5 degrees. Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame. Etc.
- futharkshill 5y ago
  > Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame. I have to ask: is this serious or not? While extremely funny, are you guys all working for places where this is not potentially billions in damages?
  - scrumbledober 5y ago
    Sounds like it was only on dev boards, not going out to production.
    - admax88qqq 5y ago
      Dev work often finds curious ways to production.
    - junon 5y ago

mjg59 5y ago

I can only aspire to this level of beautiful whimsy - it's unfortunate that it triggered a codepath that could be measured, because that is by far the easiest excuse to remove something beautiful and rarely seen. The closest I've managed is: $ grep -o --text U+1F4A9 vmlinux U+1F4A9 and while there may be an argument that this is whimsical, I don't think there's an argument that it's beautiful. (U+1F4A9 should be the literal Unicode PILE OF POO glyph, but HN strips it, so)

stavros 5y ago
But those bytes could randomly be in anything, doesn't mean they're interpreted as Unicode, no?
- mjg59 5y ago
  Oh absolutely - as far as the code is concerned they're just bytes, the fact that interpreting them as UTF-8 is entertaining is not something the kernel cares about at all.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Ah OK, I thought it was implying that the kernel displayed a pile of poo somewhere.
mjg59 5y ago
Although the fact that I've since encoded the "UUID" that this is contained within into other codebases such that Linux can't remove it without breaking some deployed u-boot builds is definitely something I'm proud of.
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  Your mention of UUID, reminded me that the GUIDs for Microsoft office products in the Windows Registry all end with '0FF1CE' - that's a nice Easter egg I think that doesn't impact anything.

k_sze 5y ago

Are we sure those cats aren't Luna and Artemis from Sailor Moon?

Mezzie 5y ago
It's more likely to be a reference to Goodnight Moon. The book has cats at the end saying 'Goodnight, Moon!' Also there is no point in the series where Luna and Artemis actually stare at the moon together in this fashion, and the cat on the left is wearing a collar. Neither Luna nor Artemis is collared. ... I was a six year old girl when Sailor Moon premiered in America. I know WAY too much about that show.
- k_sze 5y ago
  Haha. I’m a guy and used to watch Sailor Moon with one of my best friends (also a guy) back in university.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Good TV is good TV!

wzeyiseggmind_ 5y ago

That's a good way of knowing if the shell is running Too bad it was removed

jpgvm 5y ago

TIL: Performance team are a bunch of heartless cat haters. /s These sorts of articles are awesome though. I love hearing all the stories that go on behind the scenes of huge projects like this that otherwise never see the light of day.

registeredcorn 5y ago
If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out the NCommander's video talking about Space Cadet Pinball. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw He references the same blog, and goes into some pretty incredible detail about the history of what happened to pinball coming pre-installed on Windows.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

And comments are closed so you can't ask where jgs's signature is to credit her where both the original MS developer and this blogger neglected to.

wffurr 5y ago

Somewhere there is a Windows shell programmer who debugged one too many "not even a crash" shell issues. He's got a 1000 yard stare and all he can say about it is he "saw the cats". Seeing a cat on a fence to this day stops him cold.

aasasd 5y ago

You'd think that Win used Unicode fonts by that time, and surely some mono-width replacement characters can be found in Unicode.

makach 5y ago

ahaha, excellent. I wrote a similar script, displaying on my terminal a cat looking over a fence, eyes flicking from side to side waiting for a certain web-service to become available in which the cat would be gone. the waiting game is real for most developers/coders.

rob74 5y ago

I always thought these "two cats sitting on a fence" scenes were inspired by Garfield (e.g. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/garfield/images/d/d5/2010-04-18.gif/revision/latest?cb=20191223020001 https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/garfield/images/d/d5/2010-...), but maybe Garfield based that on something even older?

jimmaswell 5y ago
Pretty sure I've seen it done in some classic Tom and Jerry.
DoctorOW 5y ago
I thought that was a behavior cats just exhibit in real life. In my apartment, there's a gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling. My cat frequently climbs up there. Pretty easy to imagine he'd do the same thing on fences were he outside.

throwawayninja 5y ago

> You see, ASCII art uses a monospace font, and the cats screen was the only part of the startup sequence that used a monospace font. Drawing the backstop window was forcing the rasterization of an entirely new font, which was costing time and memory for something that shouldn’t ever be seen in the first place. Wow, I never thought an entire operating system could be crippled by font load times. Must be a problem I'm too linux & vector font to understand.

forbiddenlake 5y ago
The article makes no mention of crippling the entire operating system. "costing time and memory" can be true without implying a large magnitude.
junon 5y ago
Most fonts are vector, except for bitmap fonts which are typically only used in BIOS/VESA output. Not sure what the brag is here.

opminion 5y ago

The local newspaper I read as a kid used pictures of cats, presumably to fill empty space.

TuringTest 5y ago

Younglings may not remember, but Mozilla browser used to include a kitchen sink[1], as a joke on the number of functions that were added to it as an internet suite beyond being just a browser[2]. [1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/kitchensink.xml https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/k... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122411 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122411

Melatonic 5y ago
I wish they left this shit in
- sebazzz 5y ago
  There is still about:robots though, which has been maintained and updated in the new style over the years. And of course, about:mozilla is still present.[0] [0]: The Beast continued its studies with renewed Focus, building great Reference works and contemplating new Realities. The Beast brought forth its followers and acolytes to create a renewed smaller form of itself and, through Mischievous means, sent it out across the world. from The Book of Mozilla, 6

mark-r 5y ago

I'll bet if you rendered those screens as 2-color GIFs, the compression would make them similar in size to the ASCII text. Then you wouldn't need fonts.

Melatonic 5y ago

I really hated windows 8 and if they had left this cat shit in I would have felt a lot better

johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago

It's great to see there are real human beings with passion and interests are developing Windows at MS. Whereas Google has no human face. People have their accounts closed and don't get any response from a human being on a support forum.

tonmoy 5y ago
I fail to see how an Easter egg absolves MS of not-being-human. If we took stock, Google probably would have more Easter eggs.

scubbo 5y ago

Fun! In one of my early roles, there was a script passed named `cat-art` that includes some images that are presumably references to this - see https://pastebin.com/hhv0nXsm https://pastebin.com/hhv0nXsm

Sniffnoy 5y ago
References to this, or drawing from the same souce as it? The comment about "jgs" would suggest the latter.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Kinda shitty they seem to have cut out her signature.
- ramses0 5y ago
  jgs- relatively a heavyweight in the world of ascii art. https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/dolphins https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/dolphins I usually put a random ascii art animal in the `motd` of random servers that I work with, and have seen tons of pieces with a “jgs” sig.
laumars 5y ago
…or a Microsoft engineer used that existing cat art. I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen. It's something to doodle while waiting for the compiler I reckon. I can't imagine OS development to be a fast iterative process.
  - laumars 5y ago
    I can’t imagine ASCII art to be the quickest thing to doodle. But that aside, someone else has now linked to the source and it wasn’t MS.

fsckboy 5y ago

you can make ascii art with a variable pitch font, you only have to do it once and it's static after that, use a font that was going to be rendered anyway.

jabbany 5y ago

Huh, reading the first half I almost expected them to have a debugging system where the cats on the fence were composited by each layer drawing only part of the scene on top of things below (fence, then one cat, then the other etc.) so you'd see different things if different parts failed. Plenty cute though.

p_l 5y ago
AFAIK SAGE computers had diagnostic programs that were written in such way that they drew a "pinup girl" on the console (there supposedly was another, more risque animated image too). If there was a malfunction, the graphics would be malformed.
- bitwize 5y ago
  Ah, the times when toxic masculinity was accepted in the workplace...
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    What?
- teakettle42 5y ago
  The full story and a photo of the display: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-never-before-told-story-of-the-worlds-first-computer-art-its-a-sexy-dame/267439/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-n...
exikyut 5y ago
This sort of strategy feels to me* like it would be ideal in a gamedev sort of environment - considering the nontrivial practical distance between each of the layers in this scenario, I can totally see each layer occasionally showing up out of alignment, or rendered in the wrong font, etc. My (very abstract and non-practical) impression is that the rendering pipeline in a game is typically much tighter/cohesive than an entire desktop shell. * I could be wrong; I'm just spouting naive hot air with no practical experience at either end of this spectrum :)

ComputerGuru 5y ago

> You see, ASCII art uses a monospace font, and the cats screen was the only part of the startup sequence that used a monospace font. But iirc, Windows 8 introduced Segoe Mono and the kernel text mode interface is/was using that font, too?

laumars 5y ago
Microsoft likely didn’t create that art. So I suspect a bigger reason for removing it was licensing, with “optimisation” being a strong excuse for not spending resource on creating original assets.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  Joan G Stark
fredoralive 5y ago
The kernel text mode font is probably baked into the kernel and not accessible from user space / Win32?
exikyut 5y ago
I *think* this was part of the shell layer. Which is why it's fascinating how the performance team wanted to prune it out; presumably the fonts were mapped into memory elsewhere and thus deduplic...oh, maybe Windows doesn't have mmap page dedupe.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  Edit: I don't think the kernel would render TTF and/or use the full graphical stak so that's probably the main difference It probably has, but maybe not between kernel and userspace
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    > Edit: I don't think the kernel would render TTF and/or use the full graphical stak so that's probably the main difference Oh but it does. Most (all?) text rendering on Windows happens in the kernel.

exikyut 5y ago

I'm pretty sure I've seen jgs in other ASCII art elsewhere.

bonergarage 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Stark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Stark > Joan G. Stark, also known by her pseudonym Spunk or her initials jgs, is an American ASCII artist. See ‘cats on a fence 8/98’ for the missing risqué frames: https://web.archive.org/web/20091028023559/http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/pets.htm#cats https://web.archive.org/web/20091028023559/http://www.geocit...
- Wang0618 5y ago
  Here is a more relative one: https://web.archive.org/web/20000307060602/http://geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/6446/cats.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20000307060602/http://geocities.... Once, I collected some ascii art and made a online gallery (https://ascii-art.pywebio.online/#0_joan_stark.cat_love https://ascii-art.pywebio.online/#0_joan_stark.cat_love), "cats on a fence " is one of them