According to Wikipedia: " AARD code was originally discovered by Geoff Chappell on 17 April 1992 and then further analyzed and documented in a joint effort with Andrew Schulman.[2][3][4][5][6] The name was derived from Microsoft programmer Aaron R. Reynolds (1955–2008),[7] who used "AARD" to sign his work; "AARD" was found in the machine code of the installer"