It's interesting this article makes no mention of Encarta. Encarta 98, 98, 2000 were the precursors to both Watercolor and Metro.

Encarta quite honestly had a beautiful typography heavy, high contrast interface, one that still shapes my design/ui preferences to this day.

If anyone needs a new wallpaper for the week.. https://archive.org/details/bliss-600dpi png and https://archive.org/details/bliss-600dpi_202006 tiff

> If anyone needs a new wallpaper for the week.

Neat. That spot on Route 12/121† is one of my favorite places to take people when they visit the Bay Area. My pic from a few months ago: https://i.imgur.com/e2jbdkx.jpeg

One thing that puzzles me though is how the story is always told that Charles O'Rear was on his way from Napa to San Francisco, i.e. westbound on the highway, but having been there it feels like it could only have been the other way around due to the angle of the POV compared to the road and the fact that when you're eastbound there's a big left-hand curve which commands your sightline to the left so it's easy to keep looking past the road and straight into Bliss: https://www.vintag.es/2022/08/bliss.html

†That particular stretch of road is both: https://cahighways.org/ROUTE012.html https://cahighways.org/ROUTE121.html

Encarta even led the charge on Windows 3.1, where Encarta 94 had the now-classic _ [] X buttons at the top, with custom titlebars, instead of the ^ v classic Windows 3.1 pair.

Microsoft Money also already had the flat look that became more popular later.