It was when monitors started changing sizes. Everyone used to have 800 x 600. Then the market exploded.
And different monitor resolutions appeared and became divergent way before the iPhone came out.
There was a period in desktop applications where some apps were absolutely positioned and didn't support anything apart from the 800 x 600 layout. You'd get this huge gutter on the right and bottom of the application window.
It was fairly brief, as changing forms from absolute positioning to relative positioning in VB6 was pretty easy.
