The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220208-00/?p=106232

by luu • 4 years ago

535 157 4 years ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

scubbo• 4 years ago

Fun! In one of my early roles, there was a script passed named `cat-art` that includes some images that are presumably references to this - see https://pastebin.com/hhv0nXsm

Sniffnoy• 4 years ago

References to this, or drawing from the same souce as it? The comment about "jgs" would suggest the latter.

boomboomsubban• 4 years ago

Kinda shitty they seem to have cut out her signature.

ramses0• 4 years ago

jgs- relatively a heavyweight in the world of ascii art.

https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/dolphins

I usually put a random ascii art animal in the `motd` of random servers that I work with, and have seen tons of pieces with a “jgs” sig.

laumars4• 4 years ago

…or a Microsoft engineer used that existing cat art. I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen.

It's something to doodle while waiting for the compiler I reckon. I can't imagine OS development to be a fast iterative process.

jug• 4 years ago

Yes, in fact their first frame looks identical to the second to last one there as for the specific placement of characters and the characters themselves.

fsckboy• 4 years ago

you can make ascii art with a variable pitch font, you only have to do it once and it's static after that, use a font that was going to be rendered anyway.

jabbany• 4 years ago

Huh, reading the first half I almost expected them to have a debugging system where the cats on the fence were composited by each layer drawing only part of the scene on top of things below (fence, then one cat, then the other etc.) so you'd see different things if different parts failed.

Plenty cute though.

exikyut3• 4 years ago

This sort of strategy feels to me* like it would be ideal in a gamedev sort of environment - considering the nontrivial practical distance between each of the layers in this scenario, I can totally see each layer occasionally showing up out of alignment, or rendered in the wrong font, etc. My (very abstract and non-practical) impression is that the rendering pipeline in a game is typically much tighter/cohesive than an entire desktop shell.

* I could be wrong; I'm just spouting naive hot air with no practical experience at either end of this spectrum :)

p_l• 4 years ago

AFAIK SAGE computers had diagnostic programs that were written in such way that they drew a "pinup girl" on the console (there supposedly was another, more risque animated image too).

If there was a malfunction, the graphics would be malformed.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Ah, the times when toxic masculinity was accepted in the workplace...

teakettle42• 4 years ago

The full story and a photo of the display:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-n...

ComputerGuru• 4 years ago

You see, ASCII art uses a monospace font, and the cats screen was the only part of the startup sequence that used a monospace font.

But iirc, Windows 8 introduced Segoe Mono and the kernel text mode interface is/was using that font, too?

exikyut3• 4 years ago

I *think* this was part of the shell layer. Which is why it's fascinating how the performance team wanted to prune it out; presumably the fonts were mapped into memory elsewhere and thus deduplic...oh, maybe Windows doesn't have mmap page dedupe.

raverbashing2• 4 years ago

Edit: I don't think the kernel would render TTF and/or use the full graphical stak so that's probably the main difference

It probably has, but maybe not between kernel and userspace

monocasa• 4 years ago

NT's VFS cache does a decent enough job at sharing pages to actual data for the same file, even between kernel space and user space; the problems start around FS metadata caching.

laumars4• 4 years ago

Microsoft likely didn’t create that art. So I suspect a bigger reason for removing it was licensing, with “optimisation” being a strong excuse for not spending resource on creating original assets.

Brian_K_White2• 4 years ago

Joan G Stark

fredoralive2• 4 years ago

The kernel text mode font is probably baked into the kernel and not accessible from user space / Win32?

exikyut3• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure I've seen jgs in other ASCII art elsewhere.

bonergarage• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Stark

Joan G. Stark, also known by her pseudonym Spunk or her initials jgs, is an American ASCII artist.

See ‘cats on a fence 8/98’ for the missing risqué frames: https://web.archive.org/web/20091028023559/http://www.geocit...

Wang0618• 4 years ago

Here is a more relative one: https://web.archive.org/web/20000307060602/http://geocities....

Once, I collected some ascii art and made a online gallery (https://ascii-art.pywebio.online/#0_joan_stark.cat_love), "cats on a fence " is one of them

rendall3• 4 years ago

I love whimsy and Easter eggs in our industry, and I add them whenever possible. There is always a reason to take them out (performance, potential user confusion, grumpy devs, whatever), but prioritizing them says a lot of good about the team and project.

In most cases, in my experience, I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Too much effort, too much potential for trouble. Older devs, especially past retirement, almost always like them. This industry started with a sense of humor and fun.

AceJohnny22• 4 years ago

Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained.

Now I work on systems that have more complexity in their I/O controllers than the devices I had started on, and no-one understands the full stack. When something goes wrong, the whimsy is the first thing that goes out the window in trying to find the root cause.

Ma8ee4• 4 years ago

I think that this is the problem. No one understands what is going on. So instead of trying to find the root cause of anything, they add another tool or another layer. And then we have 45 micro services running on a lot of expensive hardware (somewhere) doing less and with worse performance than what we used to do 15 years ago in a monolith on a single server.

rendall3• 4 years ago

Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained.

I'm going to disagree, here. Things were as difficult as they ever have been since. Systems and side-effects are better understood only in hindsight.

Coding in assembly because higher-order language wasn't invented yet. Coding in a text editor because IDEs were not a thing. Searching linked lists because what's a data-base, not to mention SQL. Needing to keep things lean because 32kb was an ungodly waste.

In that light, things are easier than ever.

One can be both professional and whimsical. In fact, I'd argue that true mastery will only come with a sense of fun and interest in your craft.

Applying whimsy can be an engineering decision. Using 418 when any error code will do, for example, if it affects nothing else.

saagarjha• 4 years ago

Amusingly, an easter egg helped in the investigation of a tricky bug recently. The launch path of Twitter’s iOS app logs a “just setting up my twttr” (which is a reference to the first tweet, of course) and it was quite useful in when trying to find the root cause for a particular crash, because the system had silently changed the launch process for apps in an OS update and we could use its presence in the logs to figure out how far along we were in the startup code.

(To round out the anecdote, I’m a performance engineer on the younger side, so we’re not all bad :P)

reaperducer4• 4 years ago

Systems were simpler,

This is a HN trope that gets trotted out every time a subject like this comes up. It's gone from amusing cliché to just boring and false.

Yes, the hardware was simpler. But the knowledge wasn't.

For example, when I first started with ray tracing in the 1990's, you used something like Turbo Pascal and had to actually know and understand all of the math behind what you were doing. Today it's just #include some random other person's library and you're off to the races.

Today if a developer wants to display a new font, they just add it to the massive tire fire pile of other abstractions they've copied from the internet. Back in the supposedly "simpler" days, you plotted out a font on graph paper, then actually did the math of converting those pixels into bytes for storage and display. And did the extra math to find ways to do it in the most efficient way possible.

The knowledge has changed, but the amount of knowledge hasn't.

Things are much simpler now than they were then. That's why programmers today think it's OK to waste so much of their computing resources. With the supercomputer power we have in our pockets, this should be a golden age of computing, but instead we use that power to feed people's vanity and addictions.

side-effects were better understood and contained.

If that was true, then retro computer enthusiasts wouldn't still be discovering features and capabilities today.

robocat• 4 years ago

Systems were simpler, side-effects were better understood and contained.

But debugability was far harder, you could not do it remotely, and there was no stackoverflow etcetera to help you.

Example: Installed in another country is an embedded controller talking RS232 to devices. The controller is resetting, probably due to a watchdog timeout. The controller software uses a custom RTOS, with no spare hardware timers and it is hard to get logs back, which restricted in size to some kilobytes. You make educated guesses as to what is happening, but are failing. Many weeks of work later, you design your own process profiling technique using a hardware logic analyser and from that you find the root cause. Easily over a man-month of work.

Jaruzel4• 4 years ago

This industry started with a sense of humor and fun.

It did, then what the hell happened? :(

Like every other industry, the fun is all gone, and the bean-counters and moronic managers have taken control.

stavros4• 4 years ago

Sounds like you need https://imgz.org

Jaruzel4• 4 years ago

Hmm, I'm guessing the bean-counters and moronic managers didn't like me calling them out?

PretzelPirate• 4 years ago

The auditors started telling me that I couldn’t build Easter eggs into my systems if I wanted to pass and meet compliance requirements.

croniev• 4 years ago

The argument that everything got more complex and bugs are harder to find now, so fun is avoided, does seem convincing, but I believe it does not account for everything. For a philosophical take: the kind of positive effects that easter eggs have, such as joy at work, team cohesion, flimflam - they are not physically measurable. They are immaterial. And the managers who are interested in making a profitable product will be focused on material measures, since at the end of the day that is what seems to be whats important on the market. To put it briefly, I believe that the materialistic world-view inspired by natural sciences and inscribed into our economies is not able to deal with more abstract benefits such as fun.

dhosek2• 4 years ago

But also black-hat hackers, spammers and all sorts of other nefarious sorts making a lot of the openness that was possible in the 80s and early 90s much less practical.

Angostura• 4 years ago

Sounds like we need WAAS

amelius• 4 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

notjustanymike3• 4 years ago

The last time I introduced an Easter eggs into a system it made the national news. I tend to stay away from them these days.

dzdt• 4 years ago

Story time! What was your famous easter egg?

Minor49er2• 4 years ago

The closest thing I get to Easter eggs in professional work is leaving references to people or things I like in testing data. Not anything worthy for a spot on The Easter Egg Archive [1], but more plentiful and certainly better than nothing.

[1] https://eeggs.com/items/47205.html

layer82• 4 years ago

I had a coworker who named all the StringBuffer variables "buffy" (as in the vampire slayer). While being a Buffy fan myself, I found this quite annoying.

bentcorner• 4 years ago

I've done this. A long time ago I did QA for a layout product and a lot of the issues were along the lines of "place this square next to this text in this certain way, see the attached screenshot for what it looks like".

The square could have been anything but I had a very cute picture of my toddler so I used a photo of them instead. So now somewhere in a database there are hundreds of reports with a picture of my kid in them :)

pwdisswordfish9• 4 years ago

Ah, so that’s where those come from!

https://i.imgur.com/mHIvkeQ.png

glenneroo• 4 years ago

Exactly... and even worse, the 404 "bot" laden with whatever garbage my teenage brain came up with at 3am back in the 90s: https://glenneroo.org/404.html

mark-r3• 4 years ago

Microsoft eventually had to remove Easter eggs entirely, because of government contracts that specified there could be no undocumented behavior in their software.

reaperducer4• 4 years ago

I tried Google, but nothing came up. Do you have a source for this?

layer82• 4 years ago

They couldn’t just document them instead? ;)

ryandrake• 4 years ago

Unpopular opinion, but I'm very much against Easter Eggs, at least in SeriousProjects™. Hear me out. When I was younger, I used to find them funny and lighthearted, but after years of having to debug other people's unnecessarily clever code, undocumented code paths, and corners of applications that had absolutely no reason to exist, I've changed my mind. Even though none of what I had to debug were technically Easter Eggs, they were unnecessary, and thus time spent working on/around them was wasted.

The best reason to not add Easter Eggs is simply: they add unnecessary (albeit tiny) risk to a project. Technical risk and schedule risk. They are not part of the software's requirements, and they are likely going to be undocumented. Every line of code we add increases risk. Part of our jobs as developers is ensuring every line we add contributes more value than risk. Easter Eggs don't do this. Sorry to be Mr. Serious Raincloud, but please leave Easter Eggs for personal, non business-critical software.

cpeterso• 4 years ago

The best reason to not add Easter Eggs is simply: they add unnecessary (albeit tiny) risk to a project.

A perfect example from the article: the performance and memory impact on Windows startup due to loading the ASCII cats’ monospace font.

wizzwizz4• 4 years ago

In well-architectured code, easter eggs are free. Removing them is trivial, but you don't need to because they don't cause problems. They add value, not only because they're great, but because they force you to make your system more extensible than it otherwise would be – but if they break, no harm done. (You might even get bug reports from users, if they stop working! But the users won't mind, because the easter egg isn't why they were using the program.)

ghostbrainalpha• 4 years ago

We all hate debugging unnecessary and pointless code.

But over the very LONG TERM projects I see with Easter Eggs tend to have had developers who cared more about the project and were having fun, which leads to an overall higher code quality. (Your own experience may be different).

rendall3• 4 years ago

Unpopular opinion, but I'm very much against Easter Eggs, at least in SeriousProjects™.

OP, here. I don't completely disagree with you. As I said, there are always reasons to take them out, and almost always, those reasons are excellent.

A well-executed Easter egg says something good about the team and the project, though. A team that has the time, resources and capability to build something neat or cool or (pleasantly) surprising, is a team that is unstressed and competent.

To be clear, I'm not discussing something like adding a clown giggle to flight control systems. I'm talking about when there are two equivalent paths, neither objectively worse than the other, I prefer when the team follows the path that adds whimsy and fun to the project over when they decide boring is better.

A team that will at least consider adding it will inevitably be more efficient than a team that absolutely will not consider it because they fear extra work.

voidfunc• 4 years ago

In most cases, in my experience, I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them. Too much effort, too much potential for trouble. Older devs, especially past retirement, almost always like them. This industry started with a sense of humor and fun.

Yea man, because most of us are just trying to get through the career part of our life to money and retire. Save your whimsy for your hobby projects. Nobody wants to debug production code with subtle easter egg behaviors.

Kalium• 4 years ago

Sooner or later, one person's subtle easter egg becomes another's mission-critical behavior. Speaking solely and strictly for myself, I do not enjoy having to support niche undefined behavior because someone thought it was cute.

jorgesborges• 4 years ago

You don’t need to invest inordinate time and energy to create cute little things at work. But this is your life! Don’t just “try to get through” parts you don’t like. Enjoy it if you can. You’re not some corporate koolaid-drinking drone if you try to have fun at work.

plushpuffin2• 4 years ago

My first programming-related job was for a company that handled instructor evaluations for colleges. The UI we showed to the instructors when setting up their evaluation questions for their students included a demo table showing some fake courses. Rather than something boring like "Calc 101", "Bio 201", etc, I decided to go with themes/settings from the Alien movie franchise, so there was a table like this:

Instructor, Course Name, etc
Ripley, Interstellar Ore Hauling
Ripley, Terraforming 101
Ripley, Criminal Justice Reform
Ripley, Military Bio-Weapons Projects

It stayed up for a few years until my boss made me change it because one of the instructors got confused, complaining that they didn't teach any of these courses.

Nition• 4 years ago

But using semi-believable generic courses would make that problem even worse!

tomc1985• 4 years ago

I can tell what generation an engineer comes from based on attitude to whimsy. Younger devs almost always don't like them.

Oh they do, it's just its more of a preference for some cute thing out of marketing. "Made with love" etc etc

dhosek2• 4 years ago

Things were also a lot more innocent in the old days. I created one of the first (if not first) comprehensive TeX archives on the internet by pointing the FTP server on a math department VAX to the actual live application tree that was in use. I never asked permission to do that. Deploying software generally involved just putting stuff in the system directories. And I had open telnet access to all kinds of machines at various institutions. I can't imagine having things that open in the contemporary world.

thriftwy• 4 years ago

This is when they did the usability disaster, BolgenOS quality Windows 8 which mistaken laptop for a tablet which was something nobody has asked for.

Millions of hours of our moms wasted combatting this one.

mdoms• 4 years ago

Man this article is just a bit of fun. Why do you have to be like this?

netmare• 4 years ago

It's bitterness from having your dreams crushed. I used to read Raymond's blog and share his passion for correctness and efficiency, but it seems like mockery now.

AceJohnny22• 4 years ago

When I worked on an early SoC with a display on the dev-board, our test software didn't do anything with the display. Depending on the last state of the system, the display usually had a bunch of ugly LCD noise on it.

Eventually I got around to implementing a rudimentary framebuffer to send to the display. Wondering what to display, I figured I'd compute a Mandelbrot fractal!

People liked it, and I was happy to have made our dev systems a little less ugly.

I went to work on other things for a few months. When I came back, they had replaced my fractal with the company logo :\

(I suspect, but don't know the codec, that the jpeg used to store the company logo ended up using more space and cycles-per-pixel than my fractal)

registeredcorn2• 4 years ago

Although frustrating and disappointing to hear, that certainly sounds like the perfect sort of opportunity to surreptitiously upload slightly altered versions of the company logo.

Slightly mismatched colors.

Bassic mispelings.

Logo rotated by 4 to 5 degrees.

Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame.

Etc.

futharkshill• 4 years ago

Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame.

I have to ask: is this serious or not? While extremely funny, are you guys all working for places where this is not potentially billions in damages?

Damogran6• 4 years ago

We had a call center with an 18 screen Hiperwall. The manager was a little OCD. Each viewport was completely configurable and modifiable.

I may have left it for awhile with each viewport rotated by a degree...maybe two.

duxup• 4 years ago

I put googly eyes on the men and women figures on the bathroom signs once.

HR sent out a series of painful to read HR speak emails where they chastised whomever did it, implied just about everything you could imagine ... all while saying nothing at all.

Whimsy can be dangerous.

Melatonic3• 4 years ago

Those ANIMALS drawing attention to our definitely not weird signs!

908B64B197• 4 years ago

HR sent out a series of painful to read HR speak emails where they chastised whomever did it, implied just about everything you could imagine ... all while saying nothing at all.

If HR cares and has time to do that it’s a sign, there's fat to trim in the organization. I’m sure your investors would be thrilled to learn that.

subsubzero2• 4 years ago

We need more whimsy in life in general and at the office more-so.

mjg593• 4 years ago

I can only aspire to this level of beautiful whimsy - it's unfortunate that it triggered a codepath that could be measured, because that is by far the easiest excuse to remove something beautiful and rarely seen. The closest I've managed is:

$ grep -o --text U+1F4A9 vmlinux

U+1F4A9

and while there may be an argument that this is whimsical, I don't think there's an argument that it's beautiful.

(U+1F4A9 should be the literal Unicode PILE OF POO glyph, but HN strips it, so)

mjg593• 4 years ago

Although the fact that I've since encoded the "UUID" that this is contained within into other codebases such that Linux can't remove it without breaking some deployed u-boot builds is definitely something I'm proud of.

Jaruzel4• 4 years ago

Your mention of UUID, reminded me that the GUIDs for Microsoft office products in the Windows Registry all end with '0FF1CE' - that's a nice Easter egg I think that doesn't impact anything.

stavros4• 4 years ago

But those bytes could randomly be in anything, doesn't mean they're interpreted as Unicode, no?

mjg593• 4 years ago

Oh absolutely - as far as the code is concerned they're just bytes, the fact that interpreting them as UTF-8 is entertaining is not something the kernel cares about at all.

k_sze2• 4 years ago

Are we sure those cats aren't Luna and Artemis from Sailor Moon?

Mezzie3• 4 years ago

It's more likely to be a reference to Goodnight Moon. The book has cats at the end saying 'Goodnight, Moon!'

Also there is no point in the series where Luna and Artemis actually stare at the moon together in this fashion, and the cat on the left is wearing a collar. Neither Luna nor Artemis is collared.

...

I was a six year old girl when Sailor Moon premiered in America. I know WAY too much about that show.

k_sze2• 4 years ago

Haha. I’m a guy and used to watch Sailor Moon with one of my best friends (also a guy) back in university.

wzeyiseggmind_• 4 years ago

That's a good way of knowing if the shell is running Too bad it was removed

jpgvm• 4 years ago

TIL: Performance team are a bunch of heartless cat haters. /s

These sorts of articles are awesome though. I love hearing all the stories that go on behind the scenes of huge projects like this that otherwise never see the light of day.

registeredcorn2• 4 years ago

If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out the NCommander's video talking about Space Cadet Pinball. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw

He references the same blog, and goes into some pretty incredible detail about the history of what happened to pinball coming pre-installed on Windows.

Brian_K_White2• 4 years ago

And comments are closed so you can't ask where jgs's signature is to credit her where both the original MS developer and this blogger neglected to.

wffurr• 4 years ago

Somewhere there is a Windows shell programmer who debugged one too many "not even a crash" shell issues. He's got a 1000 yard stare and all he can say about it is he "saw the cats". Seeing a cat on a fence to this day stops him cold.

aasasd• 4 years ago

You'd think that Win used Unicode fonts by that time, and surely some mono-width replacement characters can be found in Unicode.

makach• 4 years ago

ahaha, excellent. I wrote a similar script, displaying on my terminal a cat looking over a fence, eyes flicking from side to side waiting for a certain web-service to become available in which the cat would be gone.

the waiting game is real for most developers/coders.

rob74• 4 years ago

I always thought these "two cats sitting on a fence" scenes were inspired by Garfield (e.g. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/garfield/images/d/d5/2010-...), but maybe Garfield based that on something even older?

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

Pretty sure I've seen it done in some classic Tom and Jerry.

DoctorOW• 4 years ago

I thought that was a behavior cats just exhibit in real life. In my apartment, there's a gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling. My cat frequently climbs up there. Pretty easy to imagine he'd do the same thing on fences were he outside.

throwawayninja• 4 years ago

You see, ASCII art uses a monospace font, and the cats screen was the only part of the startup sequence that used a monospace font. Drawing the backstop window was forcing the rasterization of an entirely new font, which was costing time and memory for something that shouldn’t ever be seen in the first place.

Wow, I never thought an entire operating system could be crippled by font load times. Must be a problem I'm too linux & vector font to understand.

forbiddenlake• 4 years ago

The article makes no mention of crippling the entire operating system. "costing time and memory" can be true without implying a large magnitude.

junon2• 4 years ago

Most fonts are vector, except for bitmap fonts which are typically only used in BIOS/VESA output. Not sure what the brag is here.

opminion• 4 years ago

The local newspaper I read as a kid used pictures of cats, presumably to fill empty space.

TuringTest3• 4 years ago

Younglings may not remember, but Mozilla browser used to include a kitchen sink[1], as a joke on the number of functions that were added to it as an internet suite beyond being just a browser[2].

[1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/k...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122411

Melatonic3• 4 years ago

I wish they left this shit in

sebazzz• 4 years ago

There is still about:robots though, which has been maintained and updated in the new style over the years.

And of course, about:mozilla is still present.[0]

[0]: The Beast continued its studies with renewed Focus, building great Reference works and contemplating new Realities. The Beast brought forth its followers and acolytes to create a renewed smaller form of itself and, through Mischievous means, sent it out across the world.

from The Book of Mozilla, 6

mark-r3• 4 years ago

I'll bet if you rendered those screens as 2-color GIFs, the compression would make them similar in size to the ASCII text. Then you wouldn't need fonts.

Melatonic3• 4 years ago

I really hated windows 8 and if they had left this cat shit in I would have felt a lot better

johndfsgdgdfg• 4 years ago

It's great to see there are real human beings with passion and interests are developing Windows at MS. Whereas Google has no human face. People have their accounts closed and don't get any response from a human being on a support forum.

tonmoy• 4 years ago

I fail to see how an Easter egg absolves MS of not-being-human. If we took stock, Google probably would have more Easter eggs.

The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8

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