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.
I first noticed the trend in video games. Perhaps that would explain the irreverent nature of the messages.
That being said, most progress bars are just theater. If you want to have a good laugh, do a phone number search and hit one of the thousands of gateway pages for paid lookup companies. They will literally sit you through 10-15 fake progress bars before dropping you to a payment page.