Then I started following these links. Call it a rediscovery if you want, but it was immediately familiar to me because I had myself written about it way back in Sometimes, I proceed with the study and learn only later that I was not the first. Then all I have for consolation is that I may yet have done it best. A stand-out example is from August My attention had somehow drifted to some apparently undocumented functions in the Windows kernel which I had started to think expose behaviour that programmers might find useful or be alarmed by but, either way, would better know about.
Because Google then showed these names only in more or less automated lists of exported functions, I misled myself into thinking the field was fresh ground. As far as I know, Microsoft never has documented this as the name. Evidence for it in the binary and in public symbol files is at best indirect, except for KernelShimEngineProvider as the symbolic name of the GUID for the event provider that traces what use the feature is put to.
Had I searched for that, I would have learnt that Alex Ionescu had already mined the subject. A sort of opposite may have affected any number of journalists who contemplated building a story out of a tweet, with video, on 26th March by someone named Albacore :. I stress that I mean no criticism of Albacore. I picture him—or her—looking at some old software, possibly for reasons unrelated to easter eggs, but noticing one anyway.
Twitter is no bad medium for bringing such a thing to attention. No claim is made. Of course, I may be reading into this from my own experience. Just from preparing a disassembly, I got the unexpected diversion of an instant write-up about Credits for Internet Mail and News , which I actually did write up on 22nd August once I had dealt with my first purpose. Back then, there was no Twitter to ask quickly whether anyone already knew of these credits. Though the old website was discontinued in , the original Credits for Internet Mail and News somehow survived all the while at a third-party archive—which is where it was cited among the replies that Albacore got on Twitter within a few days.
Imagine you write about computer technology, much as you might have once upon a time for a printed magazine funded by a cover price and advertising, but now for a website funded by advertising and data collection. You learn of the tweet and see the possibility of fleshing it out for your website. Apparently you were not alone. If you call yourself an Editor in Chief, you invite some expectation of journalism with diligent fact-checking. But just what is a diligent search for concluding that an easter egg in software from 25 years ago has only just been found—indeed, for making it your headline?
As with my example, there are broadly two styles of publication to search for. Written directions might be found by searching for names: which program must you run, what must you do with it, including especially any magic incantation?
Other publications may have to be searched by guessing a title or other general description because the directions are presented in sound or pictures. For information about DOS and Windows from the s and s, you must expect to think carefully and even imaginatively about your search. Websites come and go. As will be examined towards the end of this article, directions for the Windows 95 credits were reported in a popular magazine whose cover date was barely two weeks after Windows 95 went on sale.
Another contrast with the credits for internet Mail and News is that the credits Raymond writes about truly are a Windows 95 easter egg. Neither the credits themselves nor the technique for revealing them is known in any formally released software except Windows For concreteness, it may be as well to spell out the usual directions for what Raymond means as the Windows 95 credits screen. Right-click in empty space on the desktop to get a context menu and create a new folder.
It will be named initially as New Folder. Rename it three times by editing its label, completing each edit by pressing Enter. The sequence of names to pass through, each with exactly this mixture of case and punctuation omitting the double-quotes , is:. Finally, open the folder. For both, especially if your approach to one of them is that it was undiscovered for 25 years, there is the natural question of how these things ever get found by outsiders except with the help of insider knowledge.
These two easter eggs are almost opposites on this question. For the easter egg in Internet Mail and News, the answer is simply that the presence of some sort of easter egg in this program is in plain sight to anyone who looks even casually at hex dumps.
Literally: the credits are plain text at the beginning of the. The only question from there is whether anyone who ever does think that this particular DLL is worth their time to look at will then be curious or idle enough to bother with finding how to get the easter egg revealed.
These are defined by an array back in the. It has a list-view control. Even if you want to dot the I and cross the T—and I, of all people, do not mean to dissuade you—then deducing the steps with certainty is again as straightforward as these things ever are. It works not only if you type MxoyrzTxiyMzexR but even if you close the About dialog part way through, reopen it and resume the sequence. Though I, a reverse engineer, can show you that an easter egg can be discovered without insider knowledge, I cannot tell you that reverse engineering is how easter eggs first become known to outsiders—even for as simple an easter egg as this.
The easter egg in the Windows 95 shell works at a whole extra level of sophistication—and with the elegance of showing off features that were new for Windows None of its parts are in what most would consider plain sight.
Though some certainly are open to the curious, I argue below that the magic incantations that set the whole into action, roughly corresponding to the blind typing of mortimer, could never in practice be deduced by any amount of inspection. That this easter egg was ever reported publicly, especially within mere weeks of release, can have come about only through disclosure from within Microsoft.
The BIN resource, however, fits no obvious file or data format. The BIN resource has the look of something disguised. All its bytes have the high bit set. There are many occurrences of 0x95, including in pairs, and the byte that follows tends to a narrow range. I have had this verified by 3 sources, all reliable. Andrew Cook Picayune News. Mike, the reason it's in that folder is because you just put it on your desktop. Please someone post the music up somewhere because I upgraded to windows 98 and petelewis's address didn't work.
Another neat thing happening on mine: The credits are in sections, i. It also happens when you resize the window. I thought it was neat anyway. Quatranoctal writes:. Also, you can't use F2 to rename. You MUST right click, choose rename. The Other Bill Gates writes:. Picaune News is right. It only lasts until your restart and if you restart, try to rename it, even when you use the right click thing it has to be a new folder.
If you try to delete it it doesn't go to the recycling bin it deletes automatically. Chilled Pussy writes:. Can somebody please post the file on their web site??? I have been trying to do this ever since I got win 95, and I still can't get it to work!!! Cheers, Tim. The result is surprisingly catchy, especially given the technical limitations—making it a shame that so few people ever got to hear it when you consider how many people used Windows 95 and that it was hidden on every PC on which the OS was ever installed.
If you don't have access to Windows 95 right now, you can view the entire process—and hear "Clouds"—in the video below. If you enjoyed that, why not visit composer Brian Orr's SoundCloud page for more behind-the-scenes details. To access the "Clouds," simply load any version of Windows 95 we suspect that's easier said than done in and perform the following actions: 1.
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