Did you know series: After some research I sadly have to say: "There USED TO BE an Easter Egg in HYSYS", but, you can still find it in PetroSIM.

Nothing of practical importance today. This being the Easter weekend, I recalled that HYSYS had an Easter egg. I couldn't remember how exactly to produce it, I really only remembered it had something to do with buck balls. And of course it dates back to times long ago. It also reminded me of a semi easter egg in HYSIM. For those that are too young, HYSIM was the predecessor of HYSYS in times when Windows didn't exist yet. One day working at converging a distillation column, HYSIM seemed completely lost and instead of the usual "unable to converge" or so, I got the message: "I'm toast, call mother". I have always regretted not getting more goofy error messages, a bit of fun in the workplace is good.

Back to the HYSYS easter egg, a couple of random attempts didn't produce anything, so I took to the internet. There is lots of information on easter eggs there. But it also seems that in these times where everything is scrutinised first to assess the potential risks to just about anything, easter eggs are a dying breed. And, no info on the HYSYS easter egg. Some low level editing and searching revealed that at least the word "Bucky" was still in the HYSYS code, so I still had hope of recovering the easter egg. Next port of call was the guys that must have been the ones putting in the easter egg. So a couple of Facebook and LinkedIn messages were sent to people in the Calgary area.

The result was both good and bad: I was right about "Bucky", but apparently the HYSYS easter egg had not survived the transition to Aspentech. However, if you happen to have PetroSIM around you can still revive the past: Create a new case and add a single stream to the case. Name that stream "Bucky". Then to to the Help / About screen and double click on the picture, turn up the volume! A big thank you to Darren O'Neil for letting me in on this one.