It’s Now Safe To Turn Your Windows 95 Back On

Windows 95 Startup Sound slowed by 4000%. Also, my dad bought me a computer late and so I turned out this way.

GONGENHUM
3 min readMar 25, 2023
Photo: MS Windows 95 Desktop

Our heart-wrenching embrace with Windows 95 was a déjà vu. We had pictured her specs and new features. We had dreamed about touching her supple FAT32 breasts on a Pentium 1 MMX 233 MHz bed. But we were in a dark youth phase of barely making ends meet. The charm of this unprecedented operating system was all we had fathomed in our brains. Window 3.1 was a prison. It was colorful and pretty. The mouse cursor, Minesweeper, MS Paint, and Solitaire. But they could not do much. It had a face but it could not smile or utter frequencies fluently.

Windows 95 was kinky like the voice of Samantha to Theodore in Spike Jonze’s Her. But our erection from Microsoft was no consequence of rubbing things together. It was things moving and responding and changing and twirling and transmitting. The first time we heard Blur’s “Song 2” on Fifa 98 (no embarrassment in admitting we were three years late), it took us a while to grasp. It led to us gaping and wide-open eyes. Our maximum capacity for a program could be contained in no more than six floppy disks. How can a 12mm featherweight round object embody all these things? Where have they hidden all that narration and configs and…

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GONGENHUM

The Noise of Time — Music, Culture, Lost Futures, Possible Futures, Degradation, Silver Linings, Vanity, Elegance, And Then Some More Music