Did you know? Sega's classic falling-block puzzle game Columns was not actually invented by Sega, and was derived from a X11 programming-exercise-turned-game created by Hewlett-Packard programmer Jay Geertsen?
did you kno that despite the relatively wide proliferation of various pre-Sega computer ports for Windows 3.11, Atari ST and Macintosh, no footage or images of Geertsen's X11 HP-UX version existed anywhere?
D U NO someone finally made the effort to hunt it down
video
HP-UX Columns for Ubuntu MAME
HP-UX Columns for Windows 10
Because Geertsen made Columns on the clock for Hewlett-Packard, they felt obliged to do their due diligence and formally acquire the rights from HP before selling them to Sega, and HP consented under the condition that Geertsen's ownership rights (and by extension, Sega's) were not all-exclusive: HP retained ownership of the X11 version, as well as the rights to freely distribute and package it with HP-UX. Accordingly, "xcolumns" was officially bundled in with HP-UX distros for a few years, and unofficially for decades more, but there's evidently very little overlap between game historians and Unix dorks because nobody recognised the need to document this software until now, or presumed it'd be harder to locate, or simply didn't know it was especially significant.
This obviously isn't the most thrilling discovery in the history of interactive entertainment, but it's nice to think that Jay Geertsen's humble but significant contributions to the world of videogames don't need to be reduced to a footnote in somebody else's story.

