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secret1.txt
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1996-04-23
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The Secrets Behind Windows
by Michael J. Miller
courtesy of PC Magazine
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? That was
the question posed in the old radio show "The Dark Shadow."
Today the question is: Who knows what secrets lurk in
the hearts of Windows programmers? In its worst form, this
question was raised by the New York Post, which
devoted its April 20, 1992, front page to the "Pro-
gram of Hate" -Microsoft Windows 3.1. If you choose the
WingdingSS TrueType font in Windows and type "NYC," you'll
see a poison symbol, a Star of David, and a thumbs-up
symbol. Some people interpreted this as an anti-Semitic
message-; and New York's most zealous tabloid seemed to
agree. In case you weren't in New York that day, let me
just say you'd be amazed at the intensity of the
overreaction.
There are more than a few flaws in the theory
reported by the media. First of all, Wingdings is not
designed to be typed, in as usual. The font is a collec-
tion of symbols you can insert in your documents
as simple gaphic elements. Far from a new idea, it
follows in the grand tradition of Zapf Dingbats and
other symbol fonts- I don't believe that symbol fonts
mean anything, and Microsoft strongly denies that
there are any hidden messages in Windows 3.1. More
than anything, the incident reflected the gap between
the growing universality of computer use and com-
puter illiteracy in the mass media. More to the point,
people seem to misunderstand the simple statistics
behind the issue. It's very easy to read
meanings into combinations of symbols. That
doesn't mean such meanings are there. If symbols
are assigned-in no particular order-to 220 possible keystroke
assignments, you can be certain that many common combinations
of letters will map to combinations of symbols that someone,
somewhere, will consider meaningful. This is particuarly
true when you include symbols that many people will find
useful, such as those representing Christianity, Judaism and
Islam.
If you're curious, goto your Windows wordprocessor, change
the font to Wingdings, and type the whole character set.
It all looks pretty logical-you won't notice any obvious
malicious pattern. I'm more inclined to believe that anything
you read into the pattern of symbols probably says more
about you than about the font. After all, you can write a hate
letter using any word processor.
SEE FOR YOURSELF
(The Wingdings controversy was blown out of proportion, but that
doesn't mean that Windows isn't hiding something. It is.
Try this: Go into the Program Manager in Windows 3.1 and open
the About box under the Help menu. On the screen, you will see
the Windows flag. With the Ctrl and Shift keys held down,
double click on the green section of the flag, then click
on OK to close the box. The first time you do this nothing
happens. Try it again, but don't click on OK right away.
This time, a small Windows flag will appear and start to
wave; now click on OK to close. The third time you go
through the steps, a little box will pop up with an image
of a person beside a list of the members of the Windows development
team. The list of names will scroll by. (The names take a while to
parade by; it was a big team. Just click on OK to escape.)
Go through this process of opening and double-clicking on the flag
three times for each color of the flag you click on, you'll see a
different person. The fourth images are of Bill Gates, Microsoft.
vice president Brad Silverberg (who headed the Windows team),
Microsoft execututive vice president Steve Ballmer, and the Windows 3.1
team mascot, a teddy bear. (Don't ask.)
Hidden messages are also lurking beneath many Windows
applications. Open a document in Word for Windows 2.0, go to the
Record Macro command under the Tools menu, and create a
new macro called SPIFF. Go back to Tools and hit Stop Recorder,
then Macro. Select SPIFF from the list of macro names and click
on Edit. Delete the Sub Main and End Sub commands that
Word automatically puts in. Close and save the blank macro,
then go to the program's About box and click on the Word icon.
You'll see six little men run out, followed by a WordPerfect
monster-Word's biggest competitor. The little men start to panic,
then squash the monster using the Word icon. They all cheer, and the
About box changes to an elaborate scrolling list of the Word for Win-
dows team. It's a little belligerent, but that's Microsoft's style.
If you use Lotus's Ami Pro 2.0 for Windows, try this. Goto the
About box under the Help menu and hold down the Shift, Ctrl, and Alt
keys. Press F7, then type the letters S, P, A, M followed by
the last number in the Available Memory display and the third from
the last number in that display. Then release the Shift, Ctrl, and Alt
keys. Tiny photo images of the Ami Pro developers along with their
names invade the entire screen and start to float around. Click on the
faces one by one and they'll disappear. One face, however, won't
disappear but turns into The King (an Elvis look-alike). The
unofficial explanation is that you can't kill the King because he's already
dead. It's fun, and you can get out of it just by hitting Esc the key.
PC MAGAZINE CONTEST
Those are just three of the many secret screens that have found a life
inside windows programs. If you have one to share send me the instructions.
PC Magazine T-shirts go to those who submit the best of the bunch in an
upcoming column.
Why do we see these secret screens in so many products?
Don't the programmers have anything better to do with their time? The
answer is that the screen themselves may be secret, but the message isn't.
For most great software developers, creating a program isn't a job. it's a
way of life. As a result, they want their names-or their faces to be part
of the program. Not in the documentation, but in the code itself.
We all want software created by people who are proud enough of their work
to want their names on it.