Top Terminal easter eggs

The pinhead in psychoanalyze-pinhead is the one and only Zippy the Pinhead. The program uses the doctor program to analyze Zippy the pinhead.

The doctor command is an implementation of the famous ELIZA program, originally written by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966. It uses simple pattern recognition to mimic a Rogerian psychiatrist. You can interact with that one directly using the doctor command in emacs, if you think you can use the help.

I believe that there is also just a pinhead app called yow as well, and psychoanalyze-pinhead just ties doctor and yow together.

Wow. Such vitriol.

While they may not technically be Easter eggs, a lot of people don't know about them and so for all intents and purposes are Easter eggs to them. I am included in that number and happened to find the post entertaining.

I'm going to chime in with the rest of the people who are right about this post. I would go one more step to request that you change the title of the post to accurately reflect its content. Sure, "1 UNIX calendar and 3 emacs easter eggs" doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely, but at least it will be correct.

I'm actually surprised, nay...shocked that this even made it past the editors/moderators, has no one on staff been using UNIX? no one?

tl;dr I expect better from you TUAW, this kind of poor fact-checking is lousy reporting or information gathering at best.

Please tell me you aren't this stupid. Calling any of these "Terminal" easter eggs is akin to calling an easter egg found on, say, google, a "web browser" easter egg. Terminal has nothing to do with any of these.

Sorry for the venom. It stems from it just rubbing me the wrong way when the idiots in the tech support department at my company can't ssh into a server and they start to complain that "putty" is down.

psychoanalyze-pinhead isn't "a speedy conversation between two doctors". It's a speedy conversation between an imaginary "pinhead" (you know, person with virtually NO brains) and the "doctor", which is based on the classic program ELIZA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)

Kids today just don't know computer history and think nothing happened before 2005. Really.

By the way, the binary code on the egg photo reads 'easter egg'.

Those are not even remotely related to 'easter eggs'. The author just mentioned the file used by the 'calendar' terminal program, which is a part of BSD core (try calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.all -A 2, for example) and few things bundled with emacs text editor.

The first one (dates in history) isn't a Terminal easter egg. It's just a text file you're opening with the 'cat' command.

For the psychoanalyze one to occur properly, simply type in "doctor" in the emacs thing. Then you can type in your own responses to the doctor.

Plus, "if you timed your presses right"? What's that about? Just hit , then X. You can't really time them *wrong*.