Easter Egg in Oracle 7.3

Software Easter eggs are messages, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behavior that mainly occur in a software program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, keystrokes or other stimuli intended as a joke or to display program credits. They are often located in the "About" box of a software. An early use of the term Easter egg was to describe a message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.

I found an interesting post on AMIS technology blog by Marco Gralike. I am reproducing it partially here:

Last year our firm (AMIS) celebrated its 15th anniversary. This year Oracle celebrates its 30th year of its existence. In that reflective light, I remembered a nice "Easter egg" regarding the database software. A long time ago, I guess somewhere in 1997, 1998, I was working as a DBA consultant for a big Dutch banking cooperation. Preparing for the upcoming year 2000 in those days we tested a lot of applications and databases regarding the year 2000 problems (among others date formats regarding: YY, YYYY, RRRR…) etc.

An UNIX (AIX) system administrator of this banking cooperation accidentally did a reset to the default date/time in those days of an AIX (version 3.2?) machine (RS/6000) to 01-01-1970. I am not absolutely sure, but I think it was this date. He did this while I was starting an Oracle database (Oracle V. 7.3.x) and to my surprise I got an Oracle error from the database that said something in the lines of…"Sorry, but this date / time setting can’t be correct, because the Oracle Company didn’t exist in those days".

The other day I tested some OS / Oracle Database combinations, in the light of the anniversaries and for some fun, regarding this phenomena to see if I could reproduce the message.

I am a little bit disappointed now, because I couldn’t.

Full article on: http://technology.amis.nl/blog/?p=1880

For more easter eggs in software refer to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Easter_Egg