Someone found an easter egg hidden inside Windows 1.0, 37 years after it launched

Windows 1.0 first launched back in 1985, and revolutionised what people could with a computer. Gone were the clunky command lines of MS-DOS, replaced by a graphical user interface instead. It’s certainly pretty unrecognisable to most people these days, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t still using it. Lucas Brooks, a Windows fan who also runs the Windows Archaeology community on Twitter, recently tweeted out a new easter egg he found when digging through Windows 1.0:

It seems as though Brooks has managed to find a credits list of sorts of the developers who worked on Windows 1.0, complete with a ‘congratulations’ too. The best part is perhaps the way that it was hidden; Brooks found this credits page deep in the data of a smiley face bitmap file that shipped with Windows 1.0. It was encrypted too, and the tools needed to extract it would didn’t even exist back in 1985, when Windows 1.0 was first released. Brooks also later found another credits list inside Windows 2.x versions.

Windows 1.0 itself wasn’t actually that well received when it first launched in 1985. In fact, it was widely considered a flop due to how demanding its system requirements were, and more often that not had pretty poor performance when it came to multitasking. The New York Times for instance said that it was so slow on their system with 512KB of RAM that it felt like pouring molasses in the Arctic. Another thing that hurt its reception was that Microsoft designed Windows to be used with a mouse, something that back in 1985 was still not very common. Curiously, Microsoft never seemed to have learned their lesson, with Windows 11 also coming with high system requirements just to run, and specifically requires TPM 2.0, something that before Windows 11 many may not have heard of.

Incidentally, one name many PC gamers out there might recognise in the Windows 1.0 credits list is Gabe Newell. Newell, who’s currently the head of Valve, is perhaps better known for Steam and his Half-Life games, but prior to Valve he worked at Microsoft. He had dropped out of Harvard in 1983 and spent 13 years at Microsoft, working on the first three releases of Windows. He eventually left Microsoft in 1996 to form Valve, before quickly launching Half-Life in 1998.

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