Microsoft released Windows 95 in August 1995, and its startup sound was composed by musician Brian Eno, who was asked to create something welcoming, optimistic, and only a few seconds long. The sound became inseparable from the experience of turning on a home computer in the mid-1990s, as Windows 95 brought personal computing to millions of new users. Decades later, it survives in retrospectives, tech history videos, and memes, where a few notes are enough to signal the era before broadband, smartphones, and social media.