Finger pressing Windows key on keyboard, close up tomeqs/Shutterstock
Tech developers have a long history of adding Easter eggs to software, and users have a long history of finding them. From the minigames and animations buried in Android's software settings to strange, faux-biblical verses hidden in the Mozilla Firefox browser, these hidden software elements are a tradition nearly as old as the modern computer industry itself. They can belie the developer's nerdy allegiances, like with Google's Star Trek Easter eggs, and even Instagram slid a secret game into your DMs. But what happens when a hidden bit of code is so obscure that no one ever finds it? If a developer writes features in the woods and nobody's around to find them, did they really even code them? You might say that the most successful Easter egg is the one that goes unnoticed for the longest period of time.
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That's certainly the case for one of the most well-hidden software Easter eggs of all time, which very well could be the longest running secret in the history of tech. We're talking about the developer acknowledgements screen in Windows 1.0 RTM, which took a staggering 37 years to be uncovered. That's right, this secret screen from the mid-1980s wasn't discovered until people were already running Windows 11. It contained a list of developers with accompanying text reading, "The Windows Team," and "Congrats!" The Easter egg was discovered on March 18, 2022 by Windows enthusiast @mswin_bat on X (formerly Twitter), who explained, "Microsoft did a really good job at hiding it and I still don't really know how to trigger it. I patched some binaries to force it to show up."
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Why the Windows 1.0 RTM developer acknowledgements are the longest known secret tech Easter egg
The Windows 1.0 interface Max Miller/SlashGear
Many Easter eggs have become famous among tech and gaming enthusiasts, and some remained hidden for decades, but the Windows 1.0 RTM may be the Easter egg that remained hidden for longest at 37 years. Other hidden Windows elements went undiscovered for impressively long periods of time. Another developer acknowledgements screen in Windows 95 made it until 2021 without being discovered before it was uncovered by a Windows hacker who figured out that typing the name "Mortimer" into a window buried deep in the OS's mail app. That makes it the second longest hidden Windows Easter egg.
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Outside of Windows, other long-hidden Easter eggs have become the stuff of legend. A Christian rock band named Prodigal made waves 35 years after the release of their 1984 album by encoding a Commodore 64 program into the groove of the album's vinyl release. When a YouTuber recorded that portion of the vinyl onto cassette tape and loaded the tape into a Commodore 64 dataset, it was revealed to be a BASIC program made up of quotes from Jesus Christ and Albert Einstein. This complex, Christian chicanery is perhaps most deserving of the term "Easter egg," and it predates the hidden Windows 1.0 menu, but it only took 35 years to be discovered, so it can't claim that record.
As of this writing, it's unlikely a tech Easter egg has been discovered after a longer period than the Windows 1.0 developer acknowledgements. However, there are undoubtedly more mysteries left to uncover from software long forgotten to the ever-shifting sands of time, perhaps buried in software far less popular than Windows. It may not be long before the next digital Indiana Jones uncovers them.
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