It took thirty-seven years for a secret to be revealed in Microsoft’s first Windows, and it involves a popular figure, too…

Lucas Brooks is an avid Windows enthusiast who has been scrutinizing the pre-release versions of Bill Gates’ early operating systems. As a result, he found something in Windows 1.0 RTM. The term stands for Release to Manufacturing, which is the version that the Redmond company has marked as ready for production (nowadays, in games, we hear the term going gold), so this version is the first Windows prepared for the shops.

For nearly thirty-seven years, it has been hiding a secret, containing a list of the names of Windows developers, a “congrats!” message, and a background window with a bitmap of a smiley (which was in the operating system). The credits list data was encrypted, and Brooks says the tools to unlock it didn’t even exist when Windows 1.0 was released, so it was indeed a forward-thinking way for developers to encrypt… themselves, you might say.

So the easter egg itself is not that big a deal, but the fact that it has been hidden for so long is quite an achievement (and Brooke deserves a round of applause for solving the mystery). But it’s worth watching the video (which has no sound and only takes seventeen seconds) because someone is hiding among the developers who we can still hear today (and who has since become even more popular…).

This person left Harvard University behind and went to work for Microsoft, so his work has been incorporated into Windows. Later on, he became a game developer (for example, it was thanks to him that id Software‘s DOOM was able to move from DOS to Windows!), and under him, something called Half-Life started Valve’s march. The name? Gabe Newell…

Nice one, Microsoft: they didn’t think they’d have to wait until 2022 to find this easter egg…

Source: PCGamer

Which version of @Windows is the first to include Easter eggs? Windows 3.0? Nope. What if I tell you there is an Easter egg in Windows 1.0 RTM? This is what I have recently discovered: pic.twitter.com/dbfcv4r7jj

— Lucas Brooks (@mswin_bat) March 18, 2022