They weren't given the freedom. They took the freedom.

Life-insurance mainframes never had easter-eggs, did they? This is just a measure of how seriously people rely on software.

Wrong. :)

My dad worked for a rather large insurance company. One of the hacks printed the user's name, marched it around the border of the terminal (thin client to the mainframe) and then deleted itself before giving the user their prompt back.

I stand corrected. At least it wasn't the policyholder's name.

I’d love to see if Philips of Zoll integrated any Easter eggs into their AEDs or monitoring equipment.

Perhaps get an extra 50 joules of defib by putting in the Konami code on the directional keys.

I think nowadays an easter egg would be a hard sell on a Pull Request...

Most likely back then there were absolutely no code reviews...

You can thank the need to appeal to the 'serious business' people for that

Windows XP has no easter eggs because MS wanted to sell it to the US military, and the policy was, no undocumented features.

I suppose they could also just document it...

Yep worked for a pretty large company and they had a (capable), high ranking dev guy who was prone to add easter eggs in the UI. Konami code would cause something to fly across the screen etc. The live product was taken down twice due to these easter eggs.

There are no more easter eggs.

How did the eggs cause the product to go down?

Sad times. If you never accidentally trigger these then who cares…

The amount of complexity, bugs, and security vulnerabilities in modern software is already at a staggering level purely due to non-easter-eggs. Not only will allowing the developers to occasionally have some fun help them to be more engaged (and produce higher-quality software as a result), but a well-implemented easter egg touches a highly localized portion of the system and won't introduce any of the above in the first place.

I miss the good times when security wasn't an important thing to always keep in mind because there weren't that many hackers and script kiddies.

I don't won't you

I really appreciate the wuality of discussion here. Every time.

Happy developers are engaged and make fewer errors.