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"
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[โ€“] 44 points 4 months ago

SimCity 2000 (and many Maxis spinoffs) show the phrase "Reticulating splines" on the loading screen, which was probably not the first funny loading message, but the first one I think of. https://unsung.aresluna.org/some-rather-obscure-and-complex-mathematical-process/

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