What do you think of this fact?
Few sounds say nineties computer quite like this one: the soft, shimmering chime that played whenever Windows 95 started up. It came from a pretty unexpected place.
A brief with a stopwatch
In 1994, Microsoft designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk reached out to Brian Eno, a pioneer of ambient music, Popular Science reports. The brief was very precise: the sound had to be 3.25 seconds long. Eno found exactly that requirement amusing and later compared the job to “making a tiny little jewel.”
Still, Eno took it seriously. According to GRAMMY.com, he delivered 84 sound elements. Microsoft picked one that ran almost twice as long as requested, because it best conveyed welcome, hopefulness and progress.
The twist with the Mac
Now the best part. Eno composed the startup sound for the biggest PC operating system of its time on a computer made by the competition. “I wrote it on a Mac,” he told the BBC in 2011, as quoted by Popular Science. He added that he had never used a PC.
A sound for the national archive
In 2025, the Library of Congress, the national library of the US, added the piece as “Microsoft Windows Reboot Chime” to its National Recording Registry. That’s where it collects sound recordings it considers culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. According to Popular Science, the registry now holds 675 entries.
Bonus fact: In the same year, the Minecraft soundtrack by German producer Daniel Rosenfeld, alias C418, also joined the registry. According to GRAMMY.com, it’s only the second video game soundtrack there, after the Super Mario Bros. theme.
One of the most famous PC sounds of all time was born on a Mac.