For many of us, the music used in the background while Microsoft"s Windows 95 started booting up is still locked in our heads. That music was actually composed by well known ambient music composer Brian Eno. In a newly discovered radio interview with the BBC from 2009, Eno revealed that he actually composed the Windows 95 start up music on an Apple Macintosh machine.
Eno got a list of what the music should sound like from Microsoft, which included 150 adjectives. Some of those adjectives included words like "inspirational" "sexy", "driving", "provocative", "nostalgic" and "sentimental", which is a lot to project for just a few seconds of music. But the big revelation came when the BBC interviewer asked, naturally, if Eno had written the Windows 95 music on a PC. Eno replied, "No I wrote it on a Mac. I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them". Ouch.
Apple"s Mac machines have always had the reputation of being a better computer to create content like music and other entertainment products, and whether that reputation is justified is a matter of debate. Regardless, it must sting the higher ups at Microsoft a little bit to learn that every time Windows 95 started up on a PC, it had a little bit of Mac inside those sounds.