Aperturescience.com

[Solarmech]

This is a collection of important posts from the original Aperturescience.com thread which had gotten to long. I hope this replaces the original one so we do not get people giving duplicate information all the time. I quoted the original posts that I though where important, your opinion may differ. I have also made some notes in Cyan. I have also removed the "spoiler" tags since this info has been out a long time. I have also made a few small corrections or have highlighted some things to emphasize them. sm

Originally Posted by Adrik_senturus

http://www.aperturescience.com/

Mysterious :|

To get past the first screen type in Login (Alternatively you can type in HELP to get some wierd messages)

Put in any username and the password is "portal"

Once your pass that screen continue to the test, and it gives you a code. Dont bother memorizing it as it changes with each blink.

Answer the 50 questions, and at the end of the test we get a wierd camera feed and a supermarket bill.

The cake is a lie

There is also http://www.aperturelaboratories.com

Originally Posted by ~*NoL*~Zig

type login

make up a name

password is "portal"

than type in "thecakeisalie" and you get to a survalliance screen

not sure what it all means

Originally Posted by whyte_cloud

the video feed's of the place where you start in the game and have to escape. (methinks anyways)

Originally Posted by Aeron3

The animal question-awnsers are taken from:
http://www.animalpicturesarchive.com/animal/EngNames/

The colors come from this site:
http://www.numerospeaks.com/indexusa03.html
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors

And the pre-Christian mathematician question is based on
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/mathhist/greece.html
which i already found a few posts back on page 3

Pies is based on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cakes

Originally Posted by Aeron3

About the colors:

The colors are not from wikipedia if the flash is made after 6-august, because then the color 'Ivory' is added which is not in the list.

4 color's doesn't exist:
Cooked umber
dark light blue
yankee yellow
orangata Red

renamed 1 color
International Klein blue --> Klein blue

1 typo:
Tenn --> Tenné

and 1 color 2 times:
Safety Orange
Blaze Orange

Originally Posted by Eztli

Type "?" on the B:\ screen to get a list of commands.

Originally Posted by Papercut:Source

Copied from "my thought" thread.

The form is called EN-2873. Perhaps it stands for East 28 degrees, North 73? (It's prolly reasonable to say that application forms are designated by geographic location.) That point, though, lands in the Barent Sea north of Norway. Kinda close to the Bear and Edge islands, though. And it is within the Arctic Circle. Arctic base, anyone?

This post was made before HL2 Ep 2 came out. And from that, we learned that the Borialis is in the Arctic. There may be a connection, there may not.

Originally Posted by SykoPeter

Yo peepz, found some new things:

Login as usual

Press '?'

And guess what, there are more commands to type in:

APPEND
ATRRIB
COPY
DIR
ERASE
FORMAT (but drive is write protected)
INTERROGATE
LIB
RENAME
TAPEDISK


Here y'all go. I'll be trying these new commands now.

//edit

Most of the commands seem to have a the problem that the drive is protected. This means we have to log in as someone with authority at the facility. But who?

Originally Posted by SykoPeter

http://mediaviewer.ign.com/ignMediaP...F735884p1.html

Well hello there, I guess we're gonna meet the Relaxation Room then...

From the look of things, this room is the same as the one in the servalience vid we see and is an early version of the chamber that Portal start in.

Originally Posted by Xipheon

Login:cjohnson - Password:tier3 gives you:

Notes 1
Notes 2
Notes 3
Notes 4

A big thanks to Xipheon for putting these up and keeping them there.

Originally Posted by Haas82

lol i just decompiled the swf :P
you must type bye
or play portal get linked to removed youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h50K2NVJHM
the whole history:
1953 - Aperture Science begins operations as a manufacturer of shower curtains. Early product line provides a very low-tech portal between the inside and outside of your shower. Very little science is actually involved. The name is chosen to make the curtains appear more hygienic.

1956 - Eisenhower administration awards Aperture a contract to provide shower curtains to all branches of the military except the Navy.

1957 - 1975 - Mostly shower curtains.

1978 - Aperture Founder and CEO, Cave Johnson, is exposed to mercury while secretly developing a dangerous mercury-injected rubber sheeting from which he plans to manufacture seven deadly shower curtains to be given as gifts to each member of the House Naval Appropriations committee.

1981 - Diligent Aperture engineers complete the Heimlich Counter-Maneuver and Take-A-Wish Foundation initiatives. The company announces products related to the research in a lavish, televised ceremony. These products become immediately wildly unpopular. After a string of very public choking and despondent sick child disasters, senior company officials are summoned before a Senate investigative committee. During these proceedings, an engineer mentions that some progress has been made on Tier 3, the \'man-sized ad hoc quantum tunnel through physical space with possible applications as a shower curtain.\' The committee is quickly permanently recessed, and Aperture is granted an open-ended contract to secretly continue research on the \'Portal\' and Heimlich Counter-Maneuver projects.

1981-1985 - Work progresses on the \'Portal\' project. Several high ranking Fatah personnel choke to death on lamb chunks despite the intervention of their bodyguards.

1986 - Word reaches Aperture management that another defense contractor called Black Mesa is working on a similar portal technology. In response to this news, Aperture begins developing the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS), an artificially intelligent research assistant and disk operating system.

1996 - After a decade spent bringing the disk operating parts of GLaDOS to a state of more or less basic functionality, work begins on the Genetic Lifeform component.^^Several Years Later - The untested AI is activated for the first time as one of the planned activities on Aperture\'s first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day. In many ways, the initial test goes well.

The cake pic is the same as in the ending in Portal

Originally Posted by maggot_9_5

i just noticed something which doesn't make sense

in the notes it's said
1986 - Word reaches Aperture management that another defense contractor called Black Mesa is working on a similar portal technology. In response to this news, Aperture begins developing the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS), an artificially intelligent research assistant and disk operating system.

but in the title it says
GLaDOS v1.07a (c) 1982 ApertureScience, Inc.

Originally Posted by dj-corny

NEWS

http://www.aperturescience.com

Go ahead and watch the Aperture Science Christmas Message xD

There where two vids up for the holiday. The normal one which showed as living room with a fireplace and all shorts of stuff related to things from VALVe Games (HL2 Supply boxes, the Gnome from EP2, a Turret from Portal, TF2 ornaments on the Christmas Tree and of course the Cake from Portal front and center). And the Christmas version of Still Alive is played. The 2nd vid which showed up at random is the same scene but the gnome is right up next to the camera looking right into the lense.

Originally Posted by Maninblack144

Something that isn't in the first post:
You can type IP as a command and it will give you your UID. Kinda hard to copy though, even though it isn't flashing.

There was a problem with the site early to mid 2008 and it looks like a backup was used to get it going again. This back up was the one from the holiday season for 2007 so the two holiday vids are back up.

Originally Posted by Maninblack144

A little discovery:
In a few of the questions a single letter was flashing slowly. When these letters are put behind each other, you get "thecakeisalie". How surprising

Originally Posted by flockoturtles

"Okay, we might be on to something with the letters.

After going through once and documenting them, I've come up with this; (Number is the page number the letter was found on)

1 - t
3 - h
6 - e
7 - c
8 - a
24 - k
30 - e
31 - i
36 - s
38 - a
39 - l
46 - i
48 - e


The cae is a lie? Definitely something there, but it looks like I missed some letters. I might go back and try again.

Other things I noticed; All the flashing letters that I found are located in the questions, not the answers. Also, they always seem to appear as the first letter in a word, not the middle. Of course, I might have missed some, so who knows.

Also, I see things flashing on the screen a lot, but can't tell yet what they are.

Anyways, back to researching. "

The flashing letters on screen are these

[rym9k]

Thanks for doing this, solarmech. Much better than sorting through twenty pages of BS.

Just to summarize, the site contains three important things:

Notes--which give a history of Aperture.

THECAKEISALIE--which brings about a message from a fellow employee.

Application--the same job that Chell has in Portal.


Also, you can log in as a "new employee" (name: portal, password: portal) or as an admin (name: CJOHNSON, password: TIER3). Loging in as admin gives you access to things like notes, while all other logins do not.

The most critical revelation of the site, in my opinion, is that it gives us an estimate as to the YEAR that Portal and HL take place: approximately 2002-2003.

[Sorcix]

Great post, solarmech.
Weren't you making a wiki page about this on valve dev. commmunity too?

I didn't know about the notes yet, reading them now ^^

[Solarmech]

Originally Posted by Sorcix

Great post, solarmech.
Weren't you making a wiki page about this on valve dev. commmunity too?

Um, no. I have nothing up at the valve dev community. The closest thing I would have would be
Solarmech's Crappy Little Half Life Site. sm

[markevens]

Nice compendium. You will have to petition a moderator to get it stickied. Good luck

[poconut]

Great info. Interesting notes, to be sure. A few things I still wonder about. What does the Large Egret have to do with anything? What does the interrogate function do when you enter a "known employee"? What can you play using the play function?

[Siirenias]

Well, quoting Wargame doesn't do anything...

And I can't make the message and feed appear at aperaturescience.com after filling out the application.

[markevens]

I think the feed has been disabled for about 3 months now. Either that or they changed the access words for it.

Okay, click on the black screen so you can write.
Type "login" and hit enter
type any name
"Password" will come up, type "portal"
then type "thecakeisalie" and hit enter. There is your security feed.

[Siirenias]

Yeah, that works. Is there like a janitor's station in the corner there?

[markevens]

Yeah. If you look closely, you'll see that the pod where you wake up is actually a metal hospital bed without a matress. It is an early build of the room. I had an old hospital bed with no matress, an old ratty looking table, and an IV hanger.The IV hanger is still in there, which I find strange, since the pod thingy seems like it should be able to take care of all your needs.

[marie pavie]

Wow, this thread is better than the Complimentary Victory Lift! Nice work Solarmech!

[Winterkid]

VERY good, Solarmech dude! I could pay someone to kiss you!

[Solarmech]

Originally Posted by markevens

Yeah. If you look closely, you'll see that the pod where you wake up is actually a metal hospital bed without a matress. It is an early build of the room. I had an old hospital bed with no matress, an old ratty looking table, and an IV hanger.The IV hanger is still in there, which I find strange, since the pod thingy seems like it should be able to take care of all your needs.

When they came up this room they where probably using just the models from Half Life 2 and Ep 1. It was probably all they had at the time. While the pod probably has a lot of functions, having the IV inside would not work well. The IV bag would be hard to change and controling the flow would be harder as well.

And thanks for the kind words folks. I hope the mods sticky this. I PM'ed a mod about doing it, but have not heard anything back. sm

[Winterkid]

Can anyone see if the hospital bed has straps on it?

[Solarmech]

Originally Posted by Winterkid

Can anyone see if the hospital bed has straps on it?

For the shot at IGN, it does not look like it. That was a good idea though. sm

http://mediaviewer.ign.com/mediaview...F735884p1.html