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Hello everybody and welcome back to another video!
Easter Eggs are one of my favorite tech related topics to talk about.
I’ve always found the inclusion of hidden messages and jokes in computer software by its developers
to be quite fascinating. And we’ve covered both Windows and, more recently, Macintosh Easter Eggs
on this channel before. All of these being Eggs that people have known about for years. After all,
Microsoft stopped including Easter Eggs in their products in the early 2000s, as a part of their
“Trustworthy Computing” initiative.
However the company has in the past decade or so, reintroduced small Easter Eggs in some of their products.
But it's not too often when somebody discovers an Easter Egg in a version of Windows that’s over
2 decades old. An Easter Egg that nobody, at least outside of Microsoft, knew about beforehand.
Though that’s exactly what happened just a few days ago.
So, let’s talk about it. This is the story of the Windows 95 Easter Egg hidden for over 25 years.
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Windows 95 is an operating system that should need no introduction for regular viewers of
this channel. It was released to wide appeal in August of 1995, and went on to be one of
Microsoft’s most successful products. Just like most Microsoft products from this era,
Windows 95 and its companion programs like Office 95 included hidden messages from the
software developers that a user could find by performing a series of specific actions.
The majority of these were ways to give credit to the members of the development team. And this is
pretty typical for easter eggs. I always liked to see what the development staff came up with,
because they could get very creative with this. You can name a folder with a few specific names
to launch a hidden animation with accompanying background music. Or type a few phrases in the
help menu to bring up a scrolling list of the names of the Windows 95 staff. My favorite is
hands down the “Hall of Tortured Souls” Easter Egg found in Excel 95. Which is literally a hidden game that
not only contains the names of the developers, but pictures of them as well. I go into more detail
on both of these in my full Windows Easter Eggs retrospective video, which you can check out here.
But I wanted to mention them because this newly discovered Easter Egg is very similar.
In fact, it's because of one of these Easter Eggs that we now know about this one.
It all started on Twitter last week when a user who goes by the name “Albacore” posted a short video of an Easter Egg found in
the Internet Mail application. If you don’t have this program you’ll need to open Control Panel,
go to Add/Remove Programs, click the Windows Setup Tab, and check the “Windows Messaging” checkbox.
You’ll then be asked to insert your Windows 95 setup CD to install the additional features.
To access the Egg, open up the program, click on help, and then “About Microsoft Internet Mail and News”. Select
one of the files listed, and type “MORTIMER”. You’ll then be presented with a scrolling list
of the “Microsoft Athena” development team, which is the codename for this application.
This is confirmed by a Microsoft developer on a Wikipedia talk page post from 2017.
From what it looks like, this is the very first mention of this Easter Egg. At least, outside of Microsoft.
And when the tech press got wind of it, multiple articles were written. Just to verify, I tried searching for
“MORTIMER” and “windows 95” with Google, and specifying results before March of 2021.
And… nothing. The only results referenced an educational children’s video game. And since
this game was released a year after Windows 95, it’s clear that the 2 are not related. Now
you’re probably wondering, how on Earth was this discovered in 2021? Well according to Albacore,
it was actually kind of by accident. In a reply to a question on the original tweet, Albacore said:
Yes, the Easter Egg itself was discovered through reverse-engineering. But it's pretty neat to know
that it was found while trying to reverse engineer an already widely known Easter Egg.
But what’s even cooler is the fact that the tweet got the attention of some former
Microsoft employees who worked on Windows 95. John Ludwig replied
“I had forgotten about that!” and tagged 2 other accounts.
The owner of one of those accounts, Brett, responded and said:
The conversation went on for a bit, and Albacore eventually asked about
the origins of the “Mortimer” name that was used to access the egg. Brett replied:
Another former employee responded:
Searching for this comic strip confirms both its existence, and that it was discontinued in 1995.
So it's possible that this could be a reference to it.
But as of writing, those are the only 2 possible origin stories from former Microsoft employees.
Though I will have the tweet linked down below if you want to go check it out for yourself.
And I’ll be sure to post a pinned comment with additional info if any comes to light
But that’s a brief look at the Windows 95 Easter Egg that nobody outside of Microsoft knew about for over 25 years.
I hope you all enjoyed this one.
If you did, be sure to give it a like and get subscribed.
And as always, I want to thank you all so much for watching and I will see you all in the next video.
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