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.
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 controls and smooth dribblings and long balls and hooligan chants?
This love, at first sight, was nonetheless an alien solar system of pain. It was not ours but the thought of it spanning around our rooms at night leaving our homework unfinished and our click-clack lust unrequited. We could barely afford our own shoes and now this beautiful intelligent artifact was pole-dancing in front of us. The dancer, however, was somebody else’s significant other. It took us years. Years of restless anticipation before the authorities found us worthy of a Windows 95 and a case and a monitor. And when they did, it was Windows 98. It was better. Still, it was Windows 95 that stole our tranquility away. Who is Brian Eno by the way?
Almost three decades later, in a peculiar pizza-bite of time in which torpedoed values are bread and ignorance the sauce, ambient spheres act as temporary armors against nauseating award shows and self-crumbling charts. A…
