Trivia Answers #2

A lot of good guesses, but this round of trivia was much more difficult!

1) Once upon a time, there was an easter egg in REALbasic. In the compiler, no less! What was the easter egg, and how did you trigger it?

It was a "falling blocks" game that was triggered by a pragma. If you did #pragma Tetris and then tried to compile the application, a window would popup and you could play a tetris-clone game. We removed it because the name Tetris is a trademark and we didn't want to have any battles like that.

2) Speaking of easter eggs… there was also one in the tips window. What did it say?

"Red wine on the carpet? Try club soda." You could get to it by cycling through the random tips when you right-clicked on the tips window.

3) What two REAL Software engineers had previously written compilers, and what languages did they design?
Mars wrote ObjectBasic years ago. It was an object oriented variant of BASIC.

William wrote RapidQ, which still has an active developer base. REAL Software currently owns the rights to RapidQ, and the product hasn't been actively updated in a long time.

4) Who was the very first person to purchase a copy of REALbasic?
John Balestrieri, who also was a tester for us (about 2 or 3 years ago). We announced his name at the very first REAL World I believe.

5) The “new” compiler had a codename. This name was never officially announced that I am aware of, however, there should be enough clues over the years to determine what the name was. What was the codename given to the new compiler?

The new compiler's codename was "Houdini." I believe that this information was obtainable because we used to write out houdini.input files by accident in some versions, and I think the Mac runtime used to have the name Houdini in it as well (or maybe it was HXRuntime?). Other interesting codenames we've had over the years: Spawn was the name of the RB2005 IDE, Grandpa is the name of the internal build of the IDE, and Chiroptera is the name of our 5.x debugger.