.Dust

Every­body knows (I sup­pose) the famous Easter Eggs, pieces of soft­ware that, espe­cially in the 90’s, some witty devel­op­ers placed well hid­den into Office Suite best com­po­nents.
W95 office pro­grams were full of them, and most of us started to under­stand why W95 crashed so often and why it needs too much mem­ory to run. Easter eggs were so secreted that was impos­si­ble to find them using your Excel as usual, like fill­ing cells with num­bers and doing cal­cu­la­tion. One of them, the so called Fly­ing Sim­u­la­tor, was inserted into Excel, but you can launch it only plac­ing the cur­sor in a spe­cial cell (I300;H350 but I’m not sure), writ­ing a sequence of num­bers and paren­the­sis, trans­form it into another for­mat and font, and then press Return…magically the grid revealed an old style 3D fly­ing object, in a 3D world made of chops, and you flied into using the arrows but­tons. It was imme­di­ately clear that the cun­nings that made the job was so proud of it that decided to reveal their best per­for­mances to the world, start­ing to sug­gest how to enjoy the Eggs. It was a blame­less joke, some­one liked it, some other didn’t, and it was so well hid­den that was impos­si­ble to find the game, the music, the ani­ma­tion, with­out a well detailed map.

Easter Eggs are still alive? Well, we can say that things are quite dif­fer­ent today. In the past, it was very hard that an Egg appears with­out your explicit com­mand; nowa­days their heiresses are not as fun as the prior, but they could appear with­out your per­mis­sion! Have you ever expe­ri­enced the Pow­er­Point thrilling fea­ture that closes your pre­sen­ta­tion when­ever you digit a word in a text box and you did the last save about ten slides before and you’re in a hurry to deliver your job? It’s an Easter Egg, of course, but what dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from the past is that you can acti­vate it more eas­ily! And what about the cut and paste into a Word doc, that changes your font, your bul­lets, the dimen­sions and takes out a smi­ley clip that asks “do you need any help?” It’s an Easter Egg too, very fun and eas­ily dis­cov­er­able, I’m sure that all of you already enjoyed it. Why pro­gram­mers change their mood? They under­stand that some silly jokes aren’t pow­er­ful enough, so they put in place the mas­ter plan…have you ever think about Word, Excel and Pow­er­Point as some big, very big, very very big…

Why do I blog this?
What do you think that hap­pened to my last PP presentation?

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