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.
You're going to make a lot of us feel old saying that lol. That's a pretty "modern" game in comparison to the ones who started it.
I doubt that I'm going to make you feel old, I started gaming in about 1980. I'm just saying that was the first time I saw those kind of phrases.