Windows 95 Start Up Music Revelation Revealed

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Most of us still fondly remember the Start Up sound for Windows 95 and how it represented all that the brand new operating system was all about. It was recently revealed by music composer and music style experimenter Brian Eno in an interview, that he composed the startup theme for Microsoft’s iconic Windows 95 on a Macintosh computer. You just have to love the irony. :D
 
This isn't a recent revelation, this has been known for years. Robert Fripp did the Vista sounds on a Mac too.

I'm a die-hard PC user, but I don't blame Eno - PCs were awful for audio work pre-95 (and didn't really get good for audio work until the XP era). Fripp has less of an excuse...
 
Heh I was in high school at the time and I remember the pc speaker driver that allowed it to be used as a sound card. I really had my doubts until I rebooted and heard this crackle over that crappy speaker.
 
That sound does bring back memories.

I was 15 in 95 I think I still kept a newspaper about the launch of win 95.
 
That sound does bring back memories.

I was 15 in 95 I think I still kept a newspaper about the launch of win 95.

The first and only place I ever head Edie Brickells "Good Times, Bad Times" was on the Win95 install disc. Its still a song I listen to regulary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSA-CWme3pM
Even though the quality of the video was shit back then, I was convinced she wasn't wearing a bra :cool:
 
Even today you still find tons of Macs in audio production. It isn't a matter of capabilities anymore, PCs are just as capable (which is no surprise given the hardware is the same) but more inertia. Studios used Macs since back in the day they were all you could use, and so they still use them because that is what they used.

You see the same shit with software too. Pro Tools was the One True Way(tm) back in the day to do audio production. Computers weren't powerful enough to handle it in and reasonable time, much less realtime on their own. So you loaded your system up with specialty DSP boards and they handled the heavy lifting. Fine but that time is long gone, now CPUs can do whatever you need in software easily and indeed Pro Tools uses host based processing like anything else.

Well there are still a ton of PT users and many of them don't like it. I'm amazed at how many people I'll see bitch about PT and limits it has, that other DAWs don't have, yet they'll stick with it. There's no reason they have to stick with PT on a Mac, but they do because that is what they've always used and so on.

Largely it doesn't matter, you can get most software and plugins on both platforms. Only certain hosts are platform specific. If you want Sonar or Vegas, you are running Windows. If you want Logic or Digital Performer you are using Mac. If you want Cubase, Pro Tools, Reason, Studio One, Abelton Live, and so on you can use either as they are cross platform.
 
We'll see how the long time users cope with Final Cut Pro changes. See if the new "direction" is as bad as they say it is.
 
Before Windows 95, an MS OS was too difficult (DOS) or unstable (Win3.1) to have much appeal, leaving other platforms significant niches. But, Windows 9x was good enough to bury Apple, if MS had thrown dirt at Apple, instead of a lifeline.
 
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wow how time goes by.

I remember well the day I purchased a computer (February 17,1997) IBM want to be Pentium 100Mhz socket 5 w/ win95B 8MB ram 14" crt keyboard/mouse and the modem. (retail 814USD) delivered to my residence.

Had to over clock the mobo to 120Mhz to have the cpu operate at 100Mhz and downloaded a program from a ftp to play with the registers to fake out AOL 4 to allow me to install,since AOL had to have a Pentium class cpu to allow installation.
 
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