02 Apr Look familiar?

Does this scene ring a bell?

It’s Contrarian’s Google Street View recreation of one of the most viewed images in human history: the default home screen for the Window’s XP operating system. I pumped the colours a bit, but so did Microsoft, when it adopted the Chuck O’Rear photograph, called “Bliss,” from the then fledgling stock photo service Corbiss, founded by Bill Gates and subsequently purchased by Microsoft.

In four days, Microsoft will officially stop supporting what some regard as the last best version of its Window’s operating system. In honour of the event, Lexy Savvides wrote an interesting account of the photo’s backstory for CNET’s Australian portal.

Short version: Photographer O’Rear was driving though the wine district north of San Francisco, on the way to visit his girlfriend, when he spotted the hillside, bathed in brilliant green from January rains. A non-disclosure agreement prevents him from saying how much he got for the unaltered shot, but Savvides reports it’s “one of the largest amounts ever paid for a single photograph.” Billions of people have seen it. Says O’Rear:

The neatest place I have seen was recently, actually it was in the past couple of weeks. An American photographer was allowed to go into North Korea. One of [the photographer’s images] was in some power plant, there’s a big board where two men were sitting. What’s on the screen? Bliss.

Under the White House there’s something called the situation room … there were maybe 10 or 15 monitors and what was on the monitors? Bliss. I’m sure before they allowed the photographer to come in they had to clean all of the screens, make sure there was no stuff on there we couldn’t share with the world.

More here. H/T: Alexis Madrigal. Bonus feature: What to do if you love XP and hate Windows 8.