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.
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.