A Splash of Impatience

Today in Tedium: It can feel weird to talk about modern computers without mentioning a key annoyance of using them. We never really talk about splash screens, but they’re always there. Many programs take a second to load—especially complicated ones like video editors or AAA games. So, we’ve come to accept that little pause that comes with loading them. We don’t like it, but we have to live with it. But why is this the convention? Where did it come from? And why is it so prevalent in many PC and mobile programs? Today’s Tedium considers the cultural legacy of splash screens, loading screens, and other types of time-delaying visual components. You may be looking at one right now. — Ernie @ Tedium

While not the first bootsplash, the bootsplash everyone knows.

The boot screen (a.k.a. the bootsplash), in many ways, set the tone for splash screens

When the original version of the Apple Macintosh first booted up with a simple picture of a smiling computer, it set the stage for many decades of computers that would expect users to patiently wait for their software to load.

Sometimes, the wait is a couple of minutes; sometimes just a few seconds. And while the Mac wasn’t necessarily first to this type of approach, the fact that it had a splash screen, basic as it was, was a big upgrade from other popular home computers of the time. Variants of the IBM PC would basically show you barebones BIOS screens before kicking you into a software prompt. The Commodore 64 turned on instantly, but it didn’t really take you anywhere. It gave you a line of introductory text and threw you into a dialog box … and, well, that was it.

But gradually, it would catch on, becoming known (particularly in the Linux world) as the bootsplash. Linux, as you probably know, has a way of showing you what’s happening behind the scenes at you attempt to load your operating system. Other operating systems do similar things—a modern MacOS machine booted in verbose mode often tells you in painstaking detail how it’s trying to connect to and enable various components that it needs before it drops you into the interface.

These screens exist because the software is actually doing something in the background. They’re not for show, and the operating systems are arguably the most complex applications many computers might even run.

A video showing every bootsplash Ubuntu has ever had.

There’s often no marketing or copyright information in these boot screens, in part because they aren’t there to market the tool to the user but to explain what’s happening. Often, a maximalist approach is not preferred. Windows used to be a little more maximalist with its boot screen designs, but now they’re much more Apple-like. Likewise, many Linux distros, like Ubuntu, keep things simple.

In many ways, a splash screen serves two purposes—it helps to convey information about the program that we’re using, particularly copyright and author information; and it gives the screen something to do while the program it’s running is loading into RAM, gradually trying to catch up to the user.

While many modern programs no longer need them, plenty still do, in large part because complexity is rising. They’re even common to see on smartphones, where they appear in a blink of an eye before you load whatever game you’re trying to play.

The TI-99/4a, an early example of a bootsplash.

So, where did this idea come from? I’ve been on the hunt for an exact point where I can say these screens started to appear, and I think the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows are probably a key starting point in the mainstream. It’s not particularly clear where things started, though I think the TI-99/4 boot screen, dating to 1979, is a good example of one that predates the Happy Mac.

But I think the truth is that their roots emerged from other mediums, particularly television and film.

Books have covers, but they also have title pages. In many ways, the load screen is the title page of software.

Films have used title cards since nearly the beginning (film innovator and noted racist D.W. Griffith used them heavily), with some of them exquisitely branded. They serve a clear purpose—they are used to display copyright information (unless it’s forgotten), to add context that isn’t otherwise on the screen, and in the days before sound, they were commonly used to convey dialogue.

A similar concept to the splash screen, the splash panel, has existed in comic books since at least the 1960s—especially in Manga. These pages, which became very common in the ’90s, are often used to build dramatic weight at the beginning of a comic, or around the point of a cliffhanger.

I think in some ways, having a pause in the action can be a quite powerful thing, especially in the right setting. It builds tension, which in the right setting can make the end result more powerful. The problem is, in a multitasking world, it can feel like a huge annoyance.

Five examples of splash screens that exemplify the style

Finding splash screens online isn’t the world’s easiest job. Unfortunately, we lost a good repository for them on Sourceforge a couple of years ago. The examples I have here come mostly from the GUIdebook Gallery of graphical user interfaces, with a couple sampled via the Internet Archive. (If you have any favorites or not-so-favorites, please share!)

WordPerfect was one of the early examples of a word processor that straddled the line between a text-based tool in a GUI world—arguably not very well, if you were using WP 5.1 when Windows 3.1 first came out. Here’s an example of what it looked like in its Apple IIgs variant. As GUIdebook shows, this was actually as exciting as WordPerfect’s splash screens got.

It’s forgotten about today, but even web browsers had splash screens at one point. Netscape Navigator’s splashes stand out because they managed to convey a consistent corporate style through much of their history, emphasizing the concept of navigation through the high seas of the internet. Netscape got a lot wrong during the browser wars, but the visual appearance of their splash screens, first with the ship’s helm and later with a lighthouse, was not one of those things.

Adobe applications, then and now, tend to use a very distinct visual style, where they all share a theme and get dramatically redesigned with every single version. Because there are so many applications, they tend to stick to a distinct theme. In the 1990s, they tended to stick to a more clip-art style, but by the early 2000s, the art became more abstract, and attempted to show what the tools were capable of. If you ask me, the sweet spot was the original version of the Adobe Creative Suite, which found ways to make the splash visuals look like one piece.

There’s a tendency for application splashes to get more boring over time as they tend to be swallowed into the corporate gullet. No better example of this exists than the splash screen for Future Splash Animator, later known as Flash. The second version of the application gained the highly corporate art style of its later parent, Macromedia, and during its final period, under the ownership of Adobe, it looked like a corporate tool that allowed for no creativity whatsoever. But the first version looked like fun, like something you would want to use.

In recent years, splash screens have become more spartan in nature, especially those developed by Microsoft. (I’d argue that Adobe has gotten more interesting, on the other hand.) For fans of minimalism, this might actually be kind of preferred. The one exception is the Mac version of Office: Almost as if to emphasize its unique development history, the splash screens on the Word and Excel for the Mac have a different corporate language and arguably feel more clever and inviting.