With the current court cases going on between Apple Inc. and Samsung regarding the Galaxy Tab and related products, I thought I would highlight a different Apple vs Apple battle.
It started in January 1968 when The Beatles (!) were looking for ways to pay lower tax and also support other artists. They came up with Apple Corps, which is a pun on apple core.
Anecdotally, Steve Jobs and The Woz had to file legal papers after their first computer started selling really well and they decided to form a company, but did not have a name yet, so chose the first word from the dictionary. Which is not apple and Jobs also claims differently.
Either way, it caused four lawsuits between the Beatles and Apple Computer between 1978 and 2006 regarding trademark infringement and who had the right to produce and sell music; as well as causing the BBC to interview the wrong Guy on live television. (Seriously, the BBC made that mistake in May 2006, read the transcript - it is hilarious).
The Beatles were responsible for stopping development of the Apple II in the late eighties, probably the first time that musicians influenced the growing tech industry, just because Apple Computer built MIDI and audio recording technology into it.
Apple Computer hit back in 1991 with a system sound called Chimes in the Macintosh operating system (the sound was later renamed to sosumi, read phonetically as “so sue me".
It all eventually ended in 2006, but the Beatles music was not available on iTunes until September 2010.
All over a fruit.
Not the chocolate kind, the kind that programmers slip in to mess with you.
Since the earliest days of video games and software, the game designers and programmers have slipped hidden messages and images into the games, must like Alfred Hitchcock and Steven King do when they make cameo appearances in their films without being included on the cast list. At other times they spent a lot more time playing with the code or even putting whole games in.
In Office '97 there was a whole flight simulator game hidden in Excel and Word contained a pinball game. if you want to win Solitaire in Windows XP, just press press Alt+⇧ Shift+2 at the same time.
Asking Google Maps for walking directions from The Shire to Mordor produces "One does not simply walk into Mordor.", a warning that replicates a line from The Lord of the Rings.
Google search has also had a few others, such as typing in 'do a barrel roll' made the whole screen rotate 360 degrees. 'Make it snow' produced virtual snowflakes on the screen.
The people responsible sometimes just wanted to give the users something to do or discover by accident as most of these were not documented but discovered by accident. At other times they wanted to ensure that they are acknowledged as having played a part in the game development, or made political or social statements. Some programmers wrote their names in graffiti on the background, or gave complete new characters for you to play with.
Unfortunately the easter eggs nowadays are security risk as the big players in the industry cannot have rogue code floating around in their programs anymore. But as long as there are programmers with an agenda, even if it is just to make you laugh, we may still discover new and exciting hidden treasures.
