This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Anyone who booted up a Windows computer in the early 2000's is likely familiar with the grassy hillsides and brilliant sky of "Bliss", a 1996 photograph by California wine country photographer Charles O'Rear. The image is precisely what a basic background should be: clean, bright, airy, inviting. Fittingly, "Bliss" lacks an immediate point of interest, so it fades into the back without distracting from the various files that inevitably accumulate on the desktop.
I lived in northern California at the time Windows XP was released, and the location obviously seemed from somewhere in the region. But I never knew exactly where it was, and I've occasionally wondered about the fate of that iconic landscape. By chance, while googling about this afternoon, I encountered a second photographer, Simon Goldin, who in 2006 re-visited the spot [location] and generously released the result under a Creative Commons license.
As we can see, the relaxing pastoral grasslands have been converted to grape production and the clean horizon is now broken by a stand of introduced Eucalyptus. Given California's intense development and agriculture pressures, this environmental degradation isn't surprising.
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The image sparked inevitable chat room debates over whether Microsoft had photoshopped or computer generated a fantasy landscape, but in some respects that's now a moot point. While the most famous computer wallpaper of all time may once have depicted a real place, the rolling green hills now exist only as a memory.
(via Napa Valley Register)
