Progress bars often come with text that tells you what it's doing. In recent years, it seems that a lot of them stopped actually telling you what they're doing and instead give you a silly unrelated message (e.g. Panoramax would give me things like "Calculating Cornish sunshine", "Measuring the high tides", "Brewing tea", etc). Where/how did this trend start?

Edit: Thanks for all the responses! It looks like this is much older than I originally thought. I played SimCity 2000 as a kid, but at that age, "reticulating splines" just sounded like normal computer jargon to me.

A progress bar with the caption "Maturing cheddars"
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] 17 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Earliest I can recall is Sim City 2000, but spoofing overly-serious progress bar info probably didn't start there...

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [โ€“] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)
  • [โ€“] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    For reasons unclear to me, SimCity "2000" came out in 1993, vs 1997 for WinAmp.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments