5 ms·

More surprising than that it took 37 years to find the easter egg, is that 37 years on from its release, someone with the tech skills to find it was bored enoug

More surprising than that it took 37 years to find the easter egg, is that 37 years on from its release, someone with the tech skills to find it was bored enough to waste time sifting rough Windows 1.0 binaries looking for ... anything. There wasn't anything worth the effort it took to write in Windows 1.0 when it was brand new.

protontorpedo 5y ago
With the enormous amount of time we all waste in cheap entertainment this days, I think the willingness to spend as much time digging and tweaking and hacking is to be celebrated.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Some people binge 200 hours of so-called reality TV a week. Others dig into the code of dead operating systems. I would think that on HN one of these would automatically be considered more worthy of one's time than the other.
  - msl 5y ago
    Yeah, figuring out how to fit 200 hours of anything into 168 hours seems like a worthy endeavor indeed.
    - drewzero1 5y ago
      You could just squeak by if you watched it on 1.25s speed. You'd even have 8 hours to nap or go to the bathroom!
      - slightwinder 5y ago
        I watch most videos on 1.5 - 1.8, and sometimes even run some parallel. That's pretty normal these days with all that low quality-content around. But even then, watching 200h in a week is pretty awful. And for high quality content I usually take a bit more time, after all it's worth it.
      - ALittleLight 5y ago
        You could increase your throughput with multiple monitors to simultaneously view multiple episodes. A bit of gaze detection and audio could switch to whichever feed your eyes focused on.
  - openknot 5y ago
    One of the most hardworking people I know, who is academically accomplished and had an extraordinarily high amount of research experience as an undergraduate, spent most of his free time on mindless reality TV. He told me that the idea was to 'shut his brain off' from his day-to-day work, while other more intensive hobbies would drain him further.
    - protontorpedo 5y ago
      That's absolutely fair and I'm not trying to imply that cheap entertainment is all bad. It was more of a reaction to the parent comment, which seemeed to imply that the endeavour wasn't worth it.
  - jatone 5y ago
    but i do both simultaneously.... the tv is background noise.
notRobot 5y ago
Agreed 100%. Windows 1.0 was way before my time, and I have no idea where I would even start if I wanted to sift through those binaries or patch them like this person did. I hope all of this information about legacy systems is documented somewhere on the internet, but I'm a afraid a lot of it might not be, and is lost as these older devs who made and worked with these systems get older and pass away.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Look up retrocomputing -- lots of people preserving history for fun.
xattt 5y ago
I can see this as a psyops strategy by adverse actors: provide enough time-wasting entertainment to drain away the creativity of a nation.
- ale42 5y ago
  "This" as the ancient-easter-egg-finding, or as spending days on youtube?
- dotancohen 5y ago
  Strategic offensive nerd-sniping.
  - dcl 5y ago
    According to the wiki article on multi-armed bandits, apparently the Allies contemplated this in WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Empirical_motivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Empirical_m... > Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[13] [13] Whittle, Peter (1979), "Discussion of Dr Gittins' paper", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 41 (2): 148–177, doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1979.tb01069.x
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      That's right out of Monty Python. The war effort was incredibly diverse.
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  China + TikTok for sure.
agumonkey 5y ago
Hey, maybe it wasn't a fruitless endeavour.. maybe someone was confused as to why a graphical shell was so tiny in comparison to his main electronjs app and decided to poke at tiny native code / assembler.
em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
Maybe this was the result of an educational exercise. Archaeologists will similarly sift through piles of sand to find little fragments from the past. Or could have been a challenge done simply for fun. Not necessarily "bored".
Someone 5y ago
On the plus side, there’s not much sifting to do. The OS ran in 256 kilobytes of memory, and shipped on five 5¼ inch floppy disks. Given the size of the code, once you’ve found the dialog, I guess backtracking to see how it can get called isn’t too hard (a fuzzer that you can ask “give me a series of inputs that gets this procedure called” might even answer that question for you)

protontorpedo 5y ago

With the enormous amount of time we all waste in cheap entertainment this days, I think the willingness to spend as much time digging and tweaking and hacking is to be celebrated.

reaperducer 5y ago
Some people binge 200 hours of so-called reality TV a week. Others dig into the code of dead operating systems. I would think that on HN one of these would automatically be considered more worthy of one's time than the other.
- msl 5y ago
  Yeah, figuring out how to fit 200 hours of anything into 168 hours seems like a worthy endeavor indeed.
  - drewzero1 5y ago
    You could just squeak by if you watched it on 1.25s speed. You'd even have 8 hours to nap or go to the bathroom!
    - slightwinder 5y ago
      I watch most videos on 1.5 - 1.8, and sometimes even run some parallel. That's pretty normal these days with all that low quality-content around. But even then, watching 200h in a week is pretty awful. And for high quality content I usually take a bit more time, after all it's worth it.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      You could increase your throughput with multiple monitors to simultaneously view multiple episodes. A bit of gaze detection and audio could switch to whichever feed your eyes focused on.
- openknot 5y ago
  One of the most hardworking people I know, who is academically accomplished and had an extraordinarily high amount of research experience as an undergraduate, spent most of his free time on mindless reality TV. He told me that the idea was to 'shut his brain off' from his day-to-day work, while other more intensive hobbies would drain him further.
  - protontorpedo 5y ago
    That's absolutely fair and I'm not trying to imply that cheap entertainment is all bad. It was more of a reaction to the parent comment, which seemeed to imply that the endeavour wasn't worth it.
- jatone 5y ago
  but i do both simultaneously.... the tv is background noise.

notRobot 5y ago

Agreed 100%. Windows 1.0 was way before my time, and I have no idea where I would even start if I wanted to sift through those binaries or patch them like this person did. I hope all of this information about legacy systems is documented somewhere on the internet, but I'm a afraid a lot of it might not be, and is lost as these older devs who made and worked with these systems get older and pass away.

nitrogen 5y ago
Look up retrocomputing -- lots of people preserving history for fun.

xattt 5y ago

I can see this as a psyops strategy by adverse actors: provide enough time-wasting entertainment to drain away the creativity of a nation.

ale42 5y ago
"This" as the ancient-easter-egg-finding, or as spending days on youtube?
dotancohen 5y ago
Strategic offensive nerd-sniping.
- dcl 5y ago
  According to the wiki article on multi-armed bandits, apparently the Allies contemplated this in WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Empirical_motivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Empirical_m... > Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[13] [13] Whittle, Peter (1979), "Discussion of Dr Gittins' paper", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 41 (2): 148–177, doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1979.tb01069.x
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    That's right out of Monty Python. The war effort was incredibly diverse.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
China + TikTok for sure.

agumonkey 5y ago

Hey, maybe it wasn't a fruitless endeavour.. maybe someone was confused as to why a graphical shell was so tiny in comparison to his main electronjs app and decided to poke at tiny native code / assembler.

em3rgent0rdr 5y ago

Maybe this was the result of an educational exercise. Archaeologists will similarly sift through piles of sand to find little fragments from the past. Or could have been a challenge done simply for fun. Not necessarily "bored".

Someone 5y ago

On the plus side, there’s not much sifting to do. The OS ran in 256 kilobytes of memory, and shipped on five 5¼ inch floppy disks. Given the size of the code, once you’ve found the dialog, I guess backtracking to see how it can get called isn’t too hard (a fuzzer that you can ask “give me a series of inputs that gets this procedure called” might even answer that question for you)