Easter egg (software)

A hidden, unauthorized feature — often a name, message, or joke — a programmer embeds in a piece of software, undocumented by the software's publisher. This vault's cluster anchors on two cases a decade apart: William Weiher's 1967–68 "make love not war" hack in Stanford AI Lab's TOPS-10 (the earliest documented instance) and Warren Robinett's 1979 hidden signature in Atari's Adventure (the first widely-known one). Both read, in this vault, as a modern instance of the same impulse behind the medieval scribal colophon — an uncredited maker recording authorship inside the artifact itself rather than on it.

References

• claim-weiher-1967-68-tops-10-hack-is-earliest-documented-software-easter-egg
• claim-robinett-hid-name-in-atari-adventure-as-uncredited-designer-signature
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-16-hop-programmer-signature-colophon.md