A geeky version of the Easter egg hunt

It's a little bit early for an Easter egg hunt, but there are so many of them lying around, it's hard to resist.

Say you're using Netscape's Navigator Internet browser. Try holding down the Control and Alt keys, and then hitting the letter F. There's a cute little surprise waiting for you there.

Click here for some quick recipes for Easter egg success.  Did you miss last week's Software column? Check the archive to stay up-to-date.

There are hundreds of Easter eggs buried in commonplace software programs -- operating systems, workaday applications like spreadsheets and word processors, and of course, games.

"It's usually just a credit thing, kind of a way of signing your work," says David Wolf, who offers an excellent compilation of about 1,500 Easter eggs at his Web site.

It's also a tempting way for wise-guy programmers to tee off on a cold and unfeeling corporate culture. That was Jacques Servin's excuse back in 1996. At the time, he worked for Maxis, makers of the SimCity line of games. Servin was working on SimCopter, in which a helicopter zips around a computer-generated city performing rescue missions.

"My immediate manager's callousness was really getting to me," says Servin. "As usual, when a game is being shipped, they overworked us way, way, way past the 40 hours we were being paid for."

One of Servin's colleagues was told to add a few scantily-clad female characters to the game. Servin, who is gay, saw his chance to make a point.

He programmed in a number of muscular men in swim trunks, who'd occasionally exchange loud kisses. "Rather than drag myself through a costly lawsuit," says Servin, "I just got pesky in a much quicker and more satisfying way."

Maxis shipped 50,000 units of SimCopter before somebody complained. Servin, of course, was fired. He landed on his feet, though. He now does contract programming work in the San Francisco area. For a time, he even worked for Lawrence Berkeley Labs, a place which, among other things, does nuclear weapons research. World War III might be more entertaining than I'd hoped.

Tiger Woods has also fallen afoul of the programmers' urge to hide Easter eggs. It seems that some versions of Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour Golf contain a video clip from the cartoon series South Park. The game was written for the Sony PlayStation console, and the video clip can only be seen if you insert the game disk in a standard PC.

The latest in Easter egg reports leaves me wondering about the vaunted intelligence of Microsoft Corp. employees. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that somebody deliberately built a "back door" into Microsoft's Internet Information Server. As a result, a cunning system vandal could have gained access to thousands of Web sites and modified them at will.

Microsoft officials insist they only found out about it recently, when a computer security expert brought the matter to their attention. The company thinks the code may have been inserted as far back as 1996, when the company was still in its knife fight with Netscape Communications Corp. That might explain why the back-door code includes the phrase, "Netscape engineers are weenies!"

So did some obscure grunt at Microsoft figure that the best way to thumb his nose at Netscape was to sabotage his own product? Or was this actually part of a master plan to subvert and control the Internet? Either way, it suggests that IQ scores may not be quite as high in Redmond, Wash., as we've been led to believe.

Microsoft has had its share of bad luck with Easter eggs. A year or so ago, I got an e-mail from a black reader who said that Microsoft had hidden racist messages in Microsoft Word 97. When she typed "I'd like to send blacks back to Africa," the thesaurus responded, "I'll drink to that."

It turned out that the thesaurus feature in Microsoft Word 97 responded with the phrase "I'll drink to that," whenever the user types in a sentence beginning with the words "I'd like." It wasn't an Easter egg at all, just a curious tic in the programming code.

Luckily, most Easter eggs are obviously harmless and rather amusing. Wolf began collecting them about four years ago when he was still in college. "At the time, I was trying to learn how to build Web pages," says Wolf. "I decided that I needed a topic to practice on, to make a Web page on. This came along right on time."

Once he got started, readers from around the world sent him their latest Easter egg discoveries. "I had no idea so many Easter eggs existed."

Wolf has carried the concept well beyond software. He's begun documenting computer hardware Easter eggs. Yes, there are inside jokes and gimmicks hidden inside the boxes. My all-time favorite is the plastic case of the original Apple Macintosh. You can't see it on the outside, but remove the lid, and you'll find the signatures of the original Mac design team etched into the plastic of the case.

There are also various Easter egg equivalents buried in movies, TV shows and books, the sort of thing that trivia buffs have noted for years. Wolf is adding quite a bit of this stuff to his site as well. He informs me, for instance, that if you ever see a movie theatre marquee in a Steven Spielberg film, read it closely. The title on the marquee, Wolf says, will probably be that of Spielberg's next film.

Meanwhile, Wolf keeps posting new and amusing software eggs, scattered throughout many of your favorite programs. There's the cute little flight-simulator program hidden inside one version of Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program.

Or the clever gag buried inside the built-in search feature of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5. By changing the browser settings in just the right way, you can ask it where to find yourself on the Internet -- or where to find happiness, or the perfect gift, or your ideal mate.

It won't tell you how to find more Easter eggs, though -- that's David Wolf's department. Or maybe you can dig up a few yourself, in honor of the season.

Hiawatha Bray's digitalMASS software column runs every Monday. He is also a technology reporter for The Boston Globe, and writes his Upgrade column every Thursday. His e-mail address is bray@globe.com.