Matthew Cox

The iconic Windows 95 startup sound was created by composer Brian Eno, who worked with U2 and David Bowie. Microsoft’s brief to Eno was kind of absurd: “A piece of music that is inspiring, universal, futuristic, sentimental, emotional…and only 3.25 seconds long.” Eno made 84 versions of the sound. He told SF Gate that it was “like making a tiny little jewel.” Microsoft paid him $35k for the sound, which has probably been heard by hundreds of millions of people. But the real benefit to Eno was that the Windows 95 sound unlocked a creative block he had with his main music projects. “I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music,” Eno said. “I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”