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.
Earliest I can recall is Sim City 2000, but spoofing overly-serious progress bar info probably didn't start there...
"Reticulating splines" lives rent free in my head every time a loading animation plays.
Those splines aren't going to reticulate themselves.
Winamp beat that I think.
For reasons unclear to me, SimCity "2000" came out in 1993, vs 1997 for WinAmp.
It's because 2000 was this not-so-distant but super exciting future for us pre-2000 people. Things just had "2000" on their names to make it sound futuristic.
Weird, I could have sworn winamp was like 91ish because I remember talking about mitnick. Turns out mitnick was 95 and I'm just old and losing chronological grasp.