A Memory of an Easter Egg
Today, I remember an Easter Egg by chance. I mean that it's not a real "Easter Egg" which is a festival item for Christianity but tricks by software developers. I'm now a faculty member at a university, but I have worked for two IT companies a long time before. I graduated from my university and worked for IT companies. The story of my Easter Egg was when I worked for the second company.
Before the story of my Easter Egg, I want to write about "Easter Eggs" in IT developers a little bit. "Easter Eggs" mean "Hidden" codes, commands, implementations, and so on. They appear according to the riddle triggers such as keys down [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[9] simultaneously. Many people can't recognize them at all. Most of them are known only by related developers.
If you are as old as me and you are an IT developer, you probably know about the famous "Easter Eggs" like "Pinball" in MS Word or "Flight Simulator" in MS Excel. I liked the "Pinball" so much.
I will go back to my story. I worked for an IT company that developed a dedicated word processor machine. In those days, personal computers were not so prevalent. Many people used dedicated word processor machines. But they had not only a word processor program but also a spreadsheet program. In particular, dedicated word processors in Japan were developed independently from the original style. I belonged to the team for developing the spreadsheet program.
I was not full-fledged in those days. So I couldn't implement "Easter Eggs" into our spreadsheet program. However, my supervisor and senior colleague implemented some "Easter Eggs" into the spreadsheet program. One of them was a high-accuracy mode. If we push some keys, the program mode is changed and appeared the high-accuracy mode. In this mode, the calculation speed becomes late, but the accuracy of the calculation becomes more precise than Lotus 1-2-3 which is the best seller spreadsheet program at that time.
Our dedicated word processor machine has gone a long time before. But I am proud of myself to work for it and it's a good memory for me.