Blast from the past.
My first PC was a 486 which ran at 100MHz[1] running Windows 95. Yeah, no DOS[2] for me, baby.

I have a vivid memory of unpacking the white PC onto my parents’ dining room table, powering it up and being greeted by the magical Windows 95 startup screen with its little fluffly clouds and the promise of a miraculous world of buttons and scrollbars inside.

Win95 Startup

Imagine my glee when, upon the boot process completing I heard this – the Win95 startup sound, or to give it its correct title the MS Sound.
I can still, without hearing it, recall it almost perfectly. It goes, *boong*, *griiing*, *ding*, *ding*, *ding*, *ding*, *ding*, *aaaaah*.

I read a few years later[3] that the MS Sound had been created by Brian Eno.
Here’s the deal.

Q: How did you come to compose “The Microsoft Sound”?
A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.”

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

I really appreciate the sentiment; the importance of working within such seemingly arbitraty constraints (3.25 seconds)[4].
Thinking about it, it makes sense that the system engineers had had some process that they needed to run before they could load the desktop and therefore needed to amuse the user who had already patiently waited out the boot time.
It’s neat and clever and hilarious.
It is also one of my enduring memories of computers.

Pity that I hate the fucking devices so much.

[1] Which means that I missed out on the really hardcore 386 Norton Utilities days.
[2] Remember autoexec.bat!?
[3] By which time I had moved on to Win98 or possibly even Linux.
[4] However, as the world will have it, of course, you’ll notice that the actual sound is not 3.25 seconds long – it’s more like 5.75.