William Weiher

Programmer who, working on Stanford AI Lab's PDP-6/10 systems between October 1967 and October 1968, wrote a "make love"/"not war" hack that DEC kept in official TOPS-10 releases as a sales-demo feature — the earliest documented instance of what would later be called a software easter egg, predating Warren Robinett's better-known 1979 Atari Adventure signature by roughly a decade. Weiher earlier worked at Seattle's Computer Center Corporation, whose PDP-10 access drew in a teenage Bill Gates and Paul Allen; Allen's 2011 memoir Idea Man independently describes him as looking "like a scribe from the Middle Ages" — the vault's payoff connection between its easter-egg cluster and its existing Altair BASIC/Gates-Allen-Davidoff cluster.

References

• claim-weiher-1967-68-tops-10-hack-is-earliest-documented-software-easter-egg — the hack itself
• claim-paul-allen-idea-man-describes-weiher-as-a-scribe-from-the-middle-ages — the Idea Man characterization
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-16-hop-programmer-signature-colophon.md