---
title: "Easter egg (software)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "term"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "easter egg"
aliases: ["software easter egg"]
first_seen: "2026-08-16T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["William Weiher","Warren Robinett","colophon","credit-misattribution","software-history"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


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: [[entity-william-weiher|William Weiher]]'s 1967–68 "make love not war" hack in Stanford AI Lab's TOPS-10 (the earliest documented instance) and [[entity-warren-robinett|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 [[entity-colophon|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