Someone Has Just Discovered an Easter Egg in Windows 1.0

While all eyes are on Windows 11 these days, some people out there are actually paying a lot more attention to what happens in Windows 1.0.

That’s right, the very first version of Windows, which was released back in 1985, is still getting some love today. And apparently, this is just the perfect opportunity to discover some pretty cool stuff that Microsoft was hiding in the operating system.

Lucas Brooks has recently come across a pretty cool Easter Egg buried in Windows 1.0: a list of developers who worked on the development of the operating system.

Shared on Twitter, the discovery wasn’t necessarily easy.

“It was very well hidden, they placed the encrypted data at the end of a bitmap file (the smiley face bitmap) and there weren't tools to extract bitmaps from NEs back then. Even if somebody managed to extract the bitmap, they wouldn't've noticed the extra data at the end,” Brooks explained.

A 37-year-old Easter Egg

Interestingly, someone discovered on Twitter that the very same Easter Egg was retained in Windows 2.x as well.

Without a doubt, the most interesting name in the list of developers displayed by this Easter Egg is Gabe Newell, the man who brought us Steam. While Newell is mostly known for being the president of Valve, he’s actually a former Microsoftie, as he worked for the software giant between 1983 and 1996.

Obviously, finding Easter Eggs in software so old is very cool, and Brooks says he’s now working specifically on discovering everything Microsoft tried to hide in its oldest operating system versions.

Windows 1.0 was the first version of Microsoft Windows, and it was released to manufacturing on November 20, 1985. The latest version, known as 1.04, received the go-ahead in April 1987 before being replaced by the substantially updated Windows 2.0.