The story behind the world’s most famous desktop wallpaper.

Microsoft has faced a lot of criticism for its classic Windows XP desktop background, which has graced more than a billion computer screens since the system’s launch in 2001. phylloxera, a bacterial disease that killed grapes . When the plague hit in 1999, about 50,000 hectares of farmland were destroyed.

Although the cost to the developers was astronomical—a total of half a billion dollars—the state of Northern California was not in good shape. The endless rows of vines have turned into a carpet of lush grass and wildflowers here and there.

This Sonoma County view was taken from Charles O’Rier’s car window in 1998 while driving on Route 121. Although a professional photographer, his work was shown to National Geographic and the Los Angeles Times, O’. The back up wasn’t on the phone that Friday evening. Instead, he visited his girlfriend (now wife) near San Francisco.

But he kept looking at the local hills. It was January, he recalls, and after the winter rains, “the grass was green and I knew the chances of finding these beautiful cliffs were pretty good.” “I’ll be ready. I’ll be alert.”

Then he saw “My God!” It’s green! “The sun is out, it’s cloudy.”

So he stopped the car, took out his medium-sized camera and took photos with Fuji color film. The bright greens and blues were unedited when O’Rear submitted them to Corbis, a stock photography and photo licensing website founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his image of Sonoma County as the default background for their new operating system..

The company never told O’Rear why his photo was selected. “Did they play for the calm?” He thought. “Did they play for a character without a problem?” But the architect duo Goldin + Sanby, who spent months researching the image for the job in 2006, said Microsoft’s trademark team “an image needs a ‘background’ more than sky graphics they used in Windows 95.” The grass and the blue sky are very similar to the two main colors of the branding scheme.

O’Rear agreed to let Microsoft buy all rights to the image. But when he tried to deliver the bad stuff, FedEx failed. Microsoft exaggerated this feature so much that none of the shipping companies could cover it with insurance. Finally, O’Rear flew to the company’s headquarters in Seattle to hand-deliver the image.

Although he signed a non-disclosure agreement preventing him from disclosing the exact price, Aurier said it was the largest sum he had ever received for a photograph – and the second largest. A simple picture, above is a picture of Bill Clinton in the arms of Monica Lewinsky.

Microsoft called Bliss, since the release of Windows XP in 2001, more than one billion people have seen it. “We focused on this hill as a backdrop for our lives in front of the screen, a sense of the unknown,” said Goldin + Sanby. The two visited the site and O’Rear recreated the famous background as part of their post-Microsoft work (2006–2007).

“We thought about the landscape painting of the 19th century, which was very effective in creating the national imagination. What kind of thinking has come out of this world? They were surprised. “If this picture is a ‘world picture’, where is it?”

People from France to Ireland to New Zealand have predicted. O’Rear remembers getting a call from Microsoft’s engineering department asking to settle the bet. Many employees were sure that Bliss was taken in Washington, near Seattle – and that the photo was photographed. No (although Microsoft later agreed to improve the green and cut the image)..

Since 1998, the hill has been replanted – a Goldin + Sanby photo, taken almost ten years later, is a row of vines and a gray, gloomy sky. “It’s interesting that people still remember this look,” Goldin + Sanby said. The idea of ​​having a standard image for every desktop on more or less every computer in the world today seems outdated. Since before social media and its algorithmic mass management.”

But even today, two years after Microsoft scrapped the system, seven percent of computers across The world is on XP. O’Rourke said he has given his picture everywhere from the White House briefing room to the North Korean power station.

“Anywhere in the world right now, if you stop someone on the street and show someone that picture, they’ll say, ‘I’ve seen it somewhere, I know me,’” he said. “I think this will last forever.”.