O’Rear spent over twenty-five years shooting photography professionally, and two of his photographs made it on the cover of National Geographic while he took pictures for them. “I always had a camera with me”, he recalled. He would drive past it on the journey from St. National Geographic photographer Charles O’Rear drove by Bliss Hill hundreds of times when he visited his girlfriend every Friday night. The company is now pushing its users to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro 64 bit, which offers a variety of new features.ĭoes it look like the oversaturated blue & green landscape you saw when you opened your laptop all those years ago? Let’s take a look. Windows XP is no longer supported in Microsoft’s world today. The CGI-looking hilltop that graced your screen when you turned on Windows XP back in the day is a real location and one you can visit. Instead, Microsoft bought O’Rear a plane ticket so he could hand-deliver the picture that would soon become one of the most recognized images of the computer age.By: Carmen MacBeth Here’s how to visit the iconic hill in the Windows XP background
Nobody knows the exact amount that O’Rear was paid for the picture, but it was too expensive for UPS or FedEx to ship the negative from Napa Valley to Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington. They liked the image so much that they chose to buy the rights instead of licensing it. When it came time for XP developers to pick a stock image for their wallpaper, they settled on Bliss. Charles O’Rear on when he saw the landscape for the first time.Īfter taking the photo, O’Rear sold it to Corbis - a digital imaging licensing company privately owned by Bill Gates. To this day, he claims the photograph was not altered in any way. He never had any intention to take the photograph, but pulled out his trusty Mamiya RZ67 when he noticed the perfect colors on his way to visit his girlfriend one Friday afternoon. The man who took the picture was Charles O’Rear, a former National Geographic photographer from Napa Valley. This is quite an accomplishment when you consider most computers were using CRT monitors with very low resolution when XP first rolled out. And contrary to popular belief, the image was in fact real and not altered in any way. Seeing it in classrooms, workplaces, or even television newsrooms was a common occurrence.ĭespite its popularity, not many people know the history behind the picture. The wallpaper was so popular that many people never bothered to change it as the default.
The iconic photograph is considered to be the most viewed image of all time and features a serene landscape of rolling hills and fluffy clouds. A casualty of this undertaking was Bliss, the default wallpaper of Windows XP. This month marked the end of an era when Microsoft officially ended support for one of the most popular operating systems of all time.
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