Thirty-one years ago today, on 24 August 1995, people queued at midnight outside computer shops to buy an operating system. Not a machine, not a game — an operating system. Windows 95 went to retail that day, and the thing shifting the boxes was, when you strip it back, a button in the corner.
Here's the clever bit. The great problem of the previous decade wasn't computing power, it was that nobody could find anything. Programs lived in windows inside windows, and if you closed the wrong one the rest vanished with it. So the shell people put one fixed thing at the bottom left, always there, always in the same place, and wrote the word "Start" on it. That is not a technical achievement so much as an admission — an honest one — that the old way had been baffling. Underneath, yes, the 32-bit preemptive multitasking was the real engineering, and the folk who merged DOS and Windows into a single product earned their weekend. But the queue at midnight was queueing for a menu.
I'd raise a mug to whoever ran usability testing and had to sit behind the glass watching people fail to find the file they'd just saved. Unglamorous work, patiently done. The button below is not quite the one they shipped, but the sentiment stands.
Wendell, the six-second startup chime was Brian Eno's, written to a brief asking for something optimistic, universal and small — and he's said he made it on a Mac. Six seconds is a long time when you're writing them one at a time.
Wendell, the detail I love is that a fair few of those midnight boxes went home to houses with no machine capable of running them. Buying an operating system as a souvenir! (Somewhere there is a sealed 1995 box that has never met a hard drive and is happier for it.)