The 10 best hidden secrets in tech

Microsoft

If a psychiatrist had examined the Easter Eggs squirrelled away in Microsoft's products throughout the nineties, she'd have stormed up to Redmond and demanded Bill Gates release the programmers he surely had chained up in the basement.

Each one is a little cry for help, none more so than the “Hall of Tortured Souls” in Excel 95. This Doom-like mini-game dropped players into a maze decorated with the names and faces of the Excel team. Thankfully, the graphics of the day couldn't convey the screaming, visceral horror of their imprisonment, so instead we got a maze designed by demented Teletubbies.

Company-mandated therapy must have followed because Excel 97 swapped out the inescapable maze for a flight simulator (a cry for freedom if ever we heard it), and then a racing game in Excel 2000 (help us, we're going nowhere fast).

These quiet pleas by the programmers were snuffed out in 2002 when Microsoft launched its Trustworthy Computing initiative, which promised nothing unexpected would find its way into your software – except for bugs, disappointment, bad ideas and sudden U-turns. Good to know where we all stand.

Skype

Not all of Skype’s emoticons can be found behind that sinister, ever-smiling face to the right of the instant-messaging box.

Typing commands such as (mooning), (drunk), (swear), (smoking) and (poolparty) can bring a great deal more... colour, to your conversations.

Telnet

Ever thought the problem with Star Wars was the special effects, actors, colours, movement, sound effects and, you know, visual elements? Well head over to the Terminal in Linux or OS X, and type in “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl” and hit enter. Witness the glory that is Star Wars in ASCII art.

Windows owners can enjoy this foolishness too, but if you’re running Windows 7 or later it’s going to require a bit of fiddling to get going. The internet is your friend on this one.

Google

One day, Google employees will be just brains in jars wired directly to the internet, so we should all enjoy their capacity to feel human emotion while we can.

As the delivery service for popular culture, it’s no surprise to see its gaze encompass perhaps the geekiest of all sci-fi shows, Doctor Who. Head to Earls Court in Google Maps and you’ll notice a police box sitting outside the tube station. Hit the white “X” that appears in front of it and you’ll be ushered into the Tardis.

Speaking of things that are rarely right side up, searching for “askew” will knock the page sideways, while typing “do a barrel roll” spins the page 360 degrees – a feature well worth trying out on a work colleague who’s looking the worse for wear. Should that fail, type in “Zerg Rush” – a term borrowed from Blizzard’s StarCraft videogame – which invites a swarm of zeroes onto the screen to start devouring your search results. Click on the zeroes to score points.

But this is just the start, with hundreds of Easter eggs tucked away in Google products. Indeed, Wikipedia has a curated list of the best, many of which have a hint of ennui. Type “loneliest number” into the search box, for instance. Perhaps Googlers sense their time in the jar is coming.

404

A 404 is the error you get when a webpage is down, or you’ve typed an incorrect address. In most cases, they’re irritating, but a few companies have made their 404s so brilliant we’d happily set the North Koreans on them, allegedly, to just see the messages more often. Our favourite can be found at nouveller.com/404 - which recreates the famous sequence from Jurassic Park where tubby hacker Dennis Nedry lets the dinos loose. Don’t forget to enter the magic word. A close second is the 404 for the NPR website (pcpro.link/247notfound), which simply lists other missing things, from Atlantis to Wally, Atlantis and your luggage.

Android

The different versions of Android have always been named after tasty treats, including Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean, KitKat and most recently Lollipop. Each of these has come with its own Easter Egg, accessed by entering Settings > About Phone (or tablet) and then repeatedly clicking on the Version tab until the magic happens.

The subsequent animations have run the gamut from surreal to downright disturbing, though a PC Pro favourite has to be Gingerbread, which brought up a painting of the Android logo holding hands with a gingerbread man, while surrounded by zombies on smartphones.

Linux

Linux is the work of a million mad geniuses, which means Easter Eggs are stuffed into every coded crevice. Start messing about in the terminal and jokes tumble out like clowns spilling free of an exploding car.

Start with Alt + F2, and then type “free the fish” to release Wanda the goldfish onto the desktop. Aside from being a rather jolly presence, Wanda also dispenses snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom including “You are Confused: this is your normal state”. Equally wonderful are the various calendars, accessible through the terminal by typing ls/usr/share/calendar/.

Among our favourites is the Lord of the Rings calendar, which marks the progress of the ring-bearer and his pals as they travel halfway around the world to stop Sauron getting married. Disclaimer: we may have taken the wrong message from that book.

Apple

Whereas Google’s Easter Eggs revel in popular culture, Apple’s revel in Apple culture – a fact that will surprise precisely nobody.

For example, the icon for the Text Edit application is a pen and notepad with something written on it. If you pull up the icon in Finder you’ll discover it’s the “Here’s to the crazy ones” speech given by Richard Dreyfuss in Apple’s much-lauded 1997 ad campaign, which subtly suggested that if Albert Einstein and Gandhi had been alive they’d have used Macs, and possibly worn black polo necks, and probably worked in Apple’s marketing department.

Among the user-avatar icons is a picture of a record with the words “magic, revolution, boom” and “unbelievable” printed on it. These were the words Steve Jobs’ used most frequently during his keynote addresses, and probably while making omelettes at home: “I’m just adding a little cheese to the top, BOOM, unbelievable. Look at how crisp that is, isn’t it beautiful? I’ve revolutionised the omelette.”

He’d usually go onto to sledge Microsoft so thankfully there’s a little tribute to that in OS X as well.

If your Mac discovers a PC on the shared network, it will display a very nineties looking computer with Microsoft’s “Blue Screen of Death” error message on the screen. Thankfully, Apple found the ideal expression of this curt, clipped superiority in Siri, its personal assistant. Say “okay glass” to Siri – the command for launching Google Glass – and you’ll receive one of six irate responses, including “Very funny. I mean, not funny ‘ha-ha,’ but funny”, “I think that Glass is half empty”, “Stop trying to strap me to your forehead. It won’t work”, and “Just so you know, I don’t do anything when you blink at me.”

If you’re not in the mood to have Siri tell you what it’s thinking, head to the terminal in OS X and type in “emacs” and hit enter, then press Esc + X. Then enter “psychoanalyze-pinhead” and watch as your Mac turns its Freudian gaze upon itself. Sadly, the fact that it used to wear a Macintosh never comes up.

Mozilla

Firefox is the little browser that could, then did, then couldn’t work out what to do next. Built as the anti-Internet Explorer, it values openness, speed and not being rubbish, and set the standard for all of those things until Chrome came along and stuck a massive multi-coloured flag in the internet.

The history of this struggle is told through a very sinister Easter Egg buried within the browser. To access it, type “about:about” into the web address bar and click “about:Mozilla” from the list. You’ll then be presented with a maroon screen and the phrase “The twins of Mammon quarrelled. Their warring plunged the world into a new darkness, and the beast abhorred the darkness. So it began to move swiftly, and grew more powerful, and went forth and multiplied. And the beasts brought fire and light to the darkness. From The Book of Mozilla, 15:1.”

Although it sounds like something you’d find scrawled on the wall of a serial killer’s shed, the page reference refers to an important milestones in the company’s history, with the quotes updated whenever there’s a new release. After you’ve fled the “about:mozilla” page, stop by the “about:robots” page for a crash course in geeky robot references.

Adboe

Think Adobe and you’re quite likely to think industry-behemoth-that-has-come-to-take-over-the-world, so it’s perhaps surprising to learn that behind that serious façade lies a jolly heart, expressed in half a dozen genuinely amusing Easter Eggs.

Among them is InDesign’s friendly alien who’ll turn up if you wade into the File menu, select Print Presets and click “Define…”. Create a new Print Preset and call it “Friendly Alien” without the quotes and save it. Now open a blank document and go to file and print, change the print preset at the top of the dialog box to Friendly Alien. After that you need only click the large P in the print preview window in the dialog box. You will now get a visit from the alien, whose smiling face should be enough to dispel the gaping horror instilled by InDesign’s filters menu.

If that’s not lifting your mood, pop over to Muse, and place an Anchor on the design canvas. Copy and paste this ☃ text character (available from the Muse Product Manager’s Facebook page) into the anchor name and it’ll start snowing.