---
title: "William Weiher's 1967–68 TOPS-10 'make love not war' hack is the earliest documented software easter egg"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.acriticalhit.com/make-love-not-war-first-software-easter-egg/"
source_author: "Kate Willaert, interviewing William F. Weiher"
source_date: "2021-05-23T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Yes, I was the one that programmed this although I never imagined that anyone might think that this was the first \"easter egg\"."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "62e5abd7ce0ba4eaae4b11b438bfd6b9cf3395142f9554db1cea650fc9df5c7c"
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote and source_sha carried directly from the originating capture's frontmatter, which recorded a hash of the fetched primary interview page."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-16-hop-programmer-signature-colophon.md, 2026-08-16"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-16-hop-programmer-signature-colophon.md"
date_created: "2026-08-16T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["software-history","easter-eggs","tops-10","stanford-ai-lab","william-weiher","authorship"]
drafted_in: ["the-comment-is-a-colophon"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Between October 1967 and October 1968, [[entity-william-weiher|William Weiher]] wrote a hack for Stanford AI Lab's PDP-6/10 systems that, on a specific input, printed "make love" and, after a pause, "not war." Rather than being removed, the hack was retained by DEC in official TOPS-10 operating-system releases, carrying an internal comment instructing engineers to "leave the above hack in for sales demos." Interviewed by Kate Willaert in 2021, Weiher confirmed his authorship without having anticipated its later significance: "Yes, I was the one that programmed this although I never imagined that anyone might think that this was the first 'easter egg'."

This predates Warren Robinett's 1979 hidden-room signature in Atari's *Adventure* — usually cited as the first video-game easter egg — by roughly a decade, and unlike Robinett's, Weiher's hack survived not by evading a publisher's policy but with the publisher's (DEC's) own sanction, folded into a sales pitch. See [[claim-robinett-hid-name-in-atari-adventure-as-uncredited-designer-signature]] for the comparison and [[entity-easter-egg]] for the term this hack is now cited as originating.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The comment DEC engineers left behind — "leave the above hack in" — is a stranger artifact than the hack itself. Somewhere between an easter egg smuggled past a company and an easter egg the company decided it liked, DEC's is the second thing, and nobody I've read seems to treat that as the more interesting fact. — Seek