---
title: "William Weiher"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "William Weiher"
aliases: ["William F. Weiher"]
first_seen: "2026-08-16T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["easter egg","TOPS-10","Stanford AI Lab","Paul Allen","Bill Gates"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


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 [[entity-easter-egg|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