Previously unknown Easteregg discovered after 25 years

March 29, 2021, 6:43 pm

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Twitter user Albacore has a rare hobby. The user looks for Easter eggs – even in antique software. With this, Albacore unearthed the previously unknown Mortimer-Easteregg at the weekend.

In the 26-year-old Windows 95 of all things, Albacore found an Easter egg that seems to have been unknown until now. In any case, it does not appear in any of the well-known Easteregg overviews. Albacore found what it was looking for in the mail program of the ancient operating system.

It’s never too late to find easter eggs. Happened to notice what looks like a never before seen easter egg in Windows 95’s / IE4’s Internet Mail. You have to open its About window, select one of the files, and type MORTIMER. Names of the program’s developers will start scrolling. pic.twitter.com/13ZCdCyBUg

— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) March 26, 2021

“It is never too late to find Easter eggs,” says Albacore on Twitter, thus meeting the approval of the community. In a video attachment to the tweet, Albacore describes the way to display the message, which he or she refers to as Mortimer-Easteregg.

The Easteregg is called quickly. From the Windows start menu you open the program “Internet Mail”. There you switch to the menu item “Help” and click on “About Microsoft Internet Mail and News” in the drop-down menu. In the following screen you mark the file comctl32.dll and type in the term “MORTIMER” on the keyboard. An automatically scrolling overview of the programmers who worked on the program now starts.

Incidentally, Albacore found the Easteregg in the mail program rather by chance. In itself, the Easteregg “Windows 95 Product Team” was the target of desire.

Here is the earliest fully functional implementation of Windows 95’s Product Team easter egg. The script is missing some names & contains a fun note @ 7:20. Folder names leading to it are different, shell32 only has hashes so a patch was needed to open it.https://t.co/GgQZf3R8ZF

— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) March 27, 2021

This is a well-known and elaborately staged overview with the names of Microsoft employees, which begins with the words “The People Behind the Magic of Windows 95”.

If you are wondering how someone can happen to come up with the idea of ​​typing MORTIMER in place X: Welcome.

Easteregg (Easter egg) are special features in software, games and websites that their developers have placed in secret and that are not easy to discover. Over the years, Google, whose Easter eggs we had already looked at here and here, has proven to be particularly mischievous.

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