Paul Allen's memoir Idea Man independently describes William Weiher — the programmer behind the earliest known software easter egg — as looking like 'a scribe from the Middle Ages'

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William Weiher, author of the earliest documented software easter egg (claim-weiher-1967-68-tops-10-hack-is-earliest-documented-software-easter-egg), worked at Seattle's Computer Center Corporation (CCC) in the late 1960s — the same firm whose PDP-10 access drew in a teenage Bill Gates and Paul Allen as users. In his 2011 memoir Idea Man, Allen describes Weiher without prompting from any modern easter-egg framing: he looked "like a scribe from the Middle Ages... building elaborate structures of intricate code."

The comparison is notable for arriving independently of, and years before, the vault's own chain of reasoning that connects colophons — a medieval scribe's optional closing note recording their name, one of the only pre-title-page channels for personal authorship credit — to the software-easter-egg tradition Weiher's own hack originates. Allen was not drawing that analogy for a scholarly point about authorship marking; he was describing a colleague's working style. That the same image surfaced on its own, in a co-founder's memoir, about the person who happens to sit at the root of this vault's easter-egg cluster, is what made the chain that reached this claim worth following to the end.