Ta-da! The history of Windows’ classic startup sounds

**Dallas Taylor** (0:00)
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

**Jensen Harris** (0:03)
Right, can you check this temperature, please, Malcolm?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:06)
Okay, this got to speed.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:07)
What you're hearing right now is a BBC recording of a computer starting up in the late 60s. At the time, it took half a dozen people spread throughout different rooms just to boot it up.

**Steve Ball** (0:18)
Okay, for standby.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:20)
Switch on standby.
This long-winded process involved giant levers, a ton of switches, and even oil and temperature checks. Right, keys in. Can you check this oil level, please, Harry? Oil okay.

**Steve Ball** (0:33)
Sound like coming on.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:44)
Back in the 1960s, most people had never even seen a computer. These primitive machines often filled entire rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But soon enough, engineers started to pack more and more power into less and less space. By the mid-80s, many people could buy a powerful computer that would fit on their desk. It was around this time that computer companies started to be much more intentional about what these devices sounded like. And that included the noises they made when you turned them on.
Startup sounds may only last a few short seconds, but they can tell us a lot about the company that designed them. These sounds are like many time capsules. If you unpack them, they reveal what the company was thinking, how they felt about their technology, and where they were headed.
Over the years, the two biggest computer companies have taken completely different approaches to their startup sounds. On the one hand, Apple has been very consistent. Here's the startup chime of a Macintosh Quadra from the early 90s.
And here's what it sounds like on a new MacBook.
But with Windows, Microsoft went in the opposite direction. Over the years, they've made at least 10 completely different startup sounds. Almost all of them have become iconic in their own right. But their first one wasn't exactly a classic. That's what you heard when you turned on a computer running Windows 1 or 2 in the late 80s. Here it is again. These early computers just couldn't play anything more complex than that. Fast forward to 1992, when Microsoft launched Windows 3.1. It included their first proper startup sound.

**Jensen Harris** (2:41)
That's the classic ta-da sound that sort of introduced Windows having sound to the world.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:48)
That's Jensen Harris.

**Jensen Harris** (2:51)
I worked at Microsoft for 16 years on a variety of products spanning user experience, so how the product looks, feels, and sounds.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:01)
By today's standards, the ta-da might not sound like much, but compared to the lo-fi that came before it, it was a pretty big upgrade.

**Jensen Harris** (3:10)
Microsoft introduced something called the Windows Sound System, which was like a bundle of drivers and a sound card that you could buy together and put into your Windows 3.1 computer. If you bought that and did that, then when you started up Windows, you got this ta-da, which was emblematic of we've arrived, we've got sound.

**Matthew Bennett** (3:35)
The sound, I think, was this little celebration of the potential of this new world.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:39)
That's Matthew Bennett, a composer and sound artist who worked at Microsoft for over a decade.

**Matthew Bennett** (3:45)
It kind of lined up with the idea of this kind of magical ta-da moment and the excitement that people had when they were booting up their first computer.
And for a lot of people, those Windows 3.1 computers were their first computers, and it was a very exciting thing to have in your house. When you think of all the different sounds they could have chosen for that, you know, wah-wah, they could have chosen almost anything, but ta-da really kind of sums up a lot of things that were going on at that time, a lot of the feelings and excitement around the technology.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:14)
For the shutdown sound, Microsoft used a quick descending xylophone.
Over the next few years, household computers exploded in popularity. Meanwhile, Microsoft was already hard at work on their next version, Windows 95 To create the new startup sound, they reached out to Brian Eno, a British composer famous for his ambient music.
Here's Eno on a BBC radio show describing the creative direction he got from Microsoft. It was very funny when I got the job because they sent me a quite long letter and it said, the piece of music should be inspirational, sexy, driving, provocative, nostalgic. Sent them over, went on and on, there were about 150 adjectives. And then at the bottom it said, and not more than 3.8 seconds long. At the time, Eno was struggling with writer's block. For him, the Windows project was a nice change of pace. But ironically, he didn't actually use a Windows computer to create the sound.