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.

  • dingus@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • gramie@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      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.