[tpmoney]

The lack of Easter eggs in programs I feel like is a combination of 3 things

1) more “professionalism” being expected in software. Computers aren’t quirky things anymore they’re “serious business” and “serious businesses don’t do quirky”. Or some other such nonsense.

2) Offense risk, something innocuous has serious potential to be taken wrong now or even at some future date. I worked on a system where we needed to impose some effectively arbitrary max limit on the number of items allowed to be configured. We eventually settled on “640k” and originally had an error if you exceed that that said “640k ought to be enough for anyone”. The devs who would have seen that message would have gotten the reference and hopefully had a good chuckle. But I’ve seen customers get short about innocuous jokes before and could easily have seen someone complaining that we weren’t taking their needs seriously.

3) Security liability. A lot of Easter eggs were distinct code paths or sometimes even entire tiny embedded applications. In an ever connected world where your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your entire customer database, any unnecessary code path is also a potential security hole and risk. No one really wants to be in the news because a cute joke their developers put in 4 years ago was the key to a massive exploit.

Still I do agree that I miss some the “personality” older software could have.

[mwcremer]

To point 2, even regular user interface can be hazardous: https://www.folklore.org/Do_It.html

[xp84]

Given that (I think?) the "OK/Cancel" dialog of the original Mac is one of those 'foundational' UI conventions that was copied pretty directly by every GUI that came after it, I am very curious if our world wouldn't be full of "Do It" buttons if this episode hadn't taken place. Even the Start Menu could have been called the "Do" menu in that alternate universe.

[tpmoney]

Interestingly, Apple's HIG generally suggest avoiding "Ok" in favor of an action describing what will happen. So save dialogs say "Save" not "OK". The empty trash dialog says "Empty Trash". Still I guess that's more clear than "Do It"

[linguae]

This change most likely happened sometime in the early 1990s, though it’s possible it could’ve happened in the late 1980s. I have a PDF copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1995 that recommends descriptive button text instead of “OK” and “Cancel.”

[esafak]

A LucasArts game called Day of the Tentacle famously contained the entirety of its predecessor, Maniac Mansion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfbIKKhlrVk

[ForOldHack]

"your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your entire customer database."

That is not the way it works now. The standard is 4 levels of encryption, most have 8. Multiple sign-offs for every single code change.

Your credit card terminal is a gateway to the signtors transaction database, last transaction, balance, current transaction. Every single code path is mapped out meticulously, at least on the most popular ones, and crypto keys are not padded like the very cheap ones.

[projektfu]

I remember FoxPro 2.5 said, "Better call MAACO, you just crashed!" in some circumstance. Thankfully that seemed to improve with resetting the computer the time I saw it.

If the file had been corrupted, I wouldn't have found it as funny.