Key points
- Microsoft has helped millions of people get things done
- Windows 95’s enchanting startup sound was crafted by Brian Eno
- Long before ChatGPT was the “Office Assistant”
PARIS, France: Providing ubiquitous desktop software for decades, Microsoft has come in for jibes, mockery and even loathing even as it has helped millions of people get things done.
Every design decision is felt around the world for better or worse — often staying with people for years as a fond memory or a meme.
Computing culture
Here are a few of the ways Microsoft has marked computing culture:
A fixture since the very first versions of Windows — if mercifully much rarer these days — the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD, is displayed when Microsoft’s operating system encounters a fatal error in a programme, or the application becomes unresponsive.
It has most commonly been a full blue screen with white text — originally composed by Steve Ballmer, who later went on to head the company — warning of the problem.
Some versions of the screen include error codes to help power users figure out what has gone wrong.
More recent editions of Windows have added a sad-face smiley in an apparent bid to sympathise.
While it has often offered the option to continue working by closing the programme or restarting the computer, many users have found the only way to escape it is by manually turning the machine off and on again.
Breath of fresh air
In a breath of fresh air from previous versions of Windows, users booting up the 2001 “XP” edition were presented with a vision of lush, sun-dappled hills under a vivid blue sky.
For many who grew up using computers in the 1990s and 2000s, the idyllic desktop background now recalls a simpler time of after-school gaming or using still-novel online chat programmes to talk with friends.
Wine industry photographer Chuck O’Rear took what has been called “the world’s most-viewed picture” in 1996, after driving by a spot in California’s Sonoma County where vines had been torn up to fight the phylloxera pest.
Dubbed “Bliss”, the background can still be spotted in the wild today on systems that have not been updated in a while, and has spawned endless memes, parodies and now AI imaginings of what the rest of the scene might look like.
2001 was far from the beginning of Microsoft’s attempts to craft a soothing environment for PC users.
The 1995 edition of the operating system played ethereal startup chimes as the machine laboured into life.
“Office Assistant”
Windows 95’s enchanting startup sound was crafted by electronic music legend Brian Eno, who told news site SFGate in 1996 that the piece was like “a tiny little jewel”.
Commissioned to make it “inspiring, universal, blah-bah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” Eno composed 84 clips before selecting the best — which was twice as long as the original three-and-a-quarter-second brief.
Long before ChatGPT was helping to write essays or generate emails, Microsoft tried to back up users of its Office productivity suite with smart software.
From the late 1990s, an “Office Assistant” interactive animated character would pop up to offer help with the task it believed was at hand.
