Can anybody trace the origins of 'Easter egg' for this meaning?
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General reference, I think.– Andrew Leach ♦Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 10:19
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1I understand it was popularised sometime in the 90s when engineers at Microsoft decided to have some fun with the products they were building. The small features or jokes were embedded into the code but were not obvious or documented and had to be discovered by the user. Hence the name,Easter Egg.– moonstarCommented Apr 29, 2013 at 10:44
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1I dunno. To me, "first use" does not equal "begins to mean": for the latter, it needs to be immediately understood in context, without further explanation needed. I.e. the question is not "when was 'Easter egg' first used in a software context", but "when did 'Easter egg' take on a second meaning". The OED answers the former question, but not really the latter one.– MarthaªCommented Apr 29, 2013 at 15:09
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2I've voted to re-open because this is like any number of etymology questions still open. Further, my answer has extra research that found an antedating that is not (yet) found in general reference sources.– HugoCommented Apr 29, 2013 at 18:44
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1This is just a guess, but could it come from the practice of holding Easter Egg hunts?– user867Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 3:26
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3 Answers
The OED has this sense of Easter egg from 1987:
1987 Re: Does Set Startup work Anymore? in comp.sys.mac (Usenet newsgroup) 13 Nov., The Option-Command ‘About MultiFinder’ easter egg was a good laugh.
This and other early uses were hidden features in software. By 2009, it was being used for hidden clues in television shows:
2009 Wall St. Jrnl. 18 Sept. w7/5 Shows like ‘Damages’, ‘Lost’ and ‘24’ drop clues, or ‘Easter eggs’, as TV writers call them, into episodes that flash on screen for mere seconds.
I found an earlier example of the hidden software feature in Usenet, also in a Mac group.
25th April 1986, Re: a few more option-keys tips in net.micro.mac:
So many of these neat messages seem to come by, but I can't tack them all up (very neatly) near the Mac. So here's a request to all you hardcore MacFreaks out there (and I know you're out there!) -
Why not have a periodically updated list of these option, command, and other combination Easter egg type-of-things?
If you already have one, please, please post it to the net. If you only have a few, please mail them to me at the address below, and when it starts to get really huge, I post it back up again.
Wikipedia links to unverified anecdotal evidence of the term being used at Atari sometime after 1979. According to an interview with Warren Robinett, programmer of "Adventure" for the Atari 2600 which contained an early Easter egg:
What actually happened was that by the time some kid or kids had discovered the secret room and Atari found out, I didn't work there any more. So they couldn't really punish me, and the manager of game software at that time decided little hidden surprises in games, which he called "Easter Eggs" were kind of cool. Also, it would have cost $10,000 to make a new mask for the ROM in the cartridge. So what happened was that Atari left the secret room in the game.
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2I personally remember reading the term in relation to home computer game software in the early-mid 80's, so I highly suspect that Atari reference is legit. Still, he may have gotten it from somewhere else too.– T.E.D.Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 21:09
A student of mine said that she'd heard that the origin of the term comes from the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which includes at least 3 instances of actual Easter eggs on screen. These were (supposedly) the result of an actual Easter egg hunt by the crew. Not all the eggs were found, which left several on set to appear in the film. Here's a web site post confirming this: http://www.eeggs.com/items/1914.html I have not investigated myself, and I'm not sure that this means that the term came into use because of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but the movie predates the Atari game by four years. It's a possibility.
There are three terms: Easter egg, Easter egg hunt, and Easter egging. The third is likely the oldest, in technical use, as it was used by radio/TV repairmen likely going back to the 50s, if not earlier. I'm relatively certain I read this term in publications such as Popular Electronics in the 60s.
The meaning is the process of replacing parts "at random" (though generally with some intuition) in a radio/TV or other piece of equipment, in an attempt to find the faulty part. This was often done using two identical pieces of equipment side-by-side, swapping parts between them.
I first heard the term "Easter egg hunt" (in the technical sense) at RCA, Camden, NJ, sometime between 1972 and 1974. To anyone familiar with the TV repairman's term its meaning was reasonably obvious -- more or less randomly searching for the location of a bug or function in a mass of undifferentiated code or hardware.
The technical sense of Easter egg, meaning an intentionally hidden feature, likely represents a collision between these two older technical terms and the original literal sense of an egg hidden for a child to find, as a sort of adventure. In particular, early mentions of "Easter egg", in a technical sense, are apt to be referencing the older technical terms, especially when the inference is that the "feature" or the hiding of it is not intentional.
answered Dec 11, 2016 at 0:03
