Microsoft went crazy with Windows 95 marketing and release.<p>They also spent 3m (reported between 8m-15m at the time though -- which was massive for its day) on licensing Stones' Start Me Up.And they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist. Jerks.<p>The hype was real though. I can still remember installing the floppy version on one of my first PCs. The first start up was like Star Trek level awe. It was so radically different and cool. Imho, Windows 95 is probably one of, if not, the most important software release of all time. Shaped how PC technology was used for the next 4 decades and still going strong.<p>I miss the 90s where every next iteration or release of hardware/software was generally a huge improvement. Like going from a 120mb hard drive to 1.6gb disk. Or getting your first CD-ROM after only having floppies, or CD-Writer (parents bought a 1x SCSI CDR the first year consumer ones came out -- made lots of coasters). Dial up to cable internet. The feeling of experiencing those new technologies was unmatched. It created such a since of awe, inspiration and wild imagination of possibilities. I don't get that feeling much these days.
I completely agree with you. Our family's first computer ran Windows 3.1. Moving to Windows 95 was a huge revelation about the potential that a computer could unleash.
> they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist.<p>Their old bassist did not make for good PR... <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Smith" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Smith</a>
The ad, for the curious:<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM</a>
I'm so grateful for flat LCD screens. Man, all those CRT boxes. Yikes.<p>The rest of this video, it doesn't look like the world has changed all that much since 1995. Computing just kind of looks the same. I guess minus the lack of phones in everyone's hands.
Is “Start Me Up” the song that goes, “you make a grown man cry”?
There were stories floating around at the time of people who were interested in buying it, having no idea what it was, not owning a computer and not realizing you needed one to use it.
Loosely related - Weezer’s lead singer writes code regularly
<a href="https://github.com/riverscuomo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/riverscuomo</a>
Always enjoy Raymond Chen's musings.<p>My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.)<p>We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.
> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.<p>This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.<p>My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.<p>It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.
I want to give a huge shout out to the UK magazine PC Format for the most absolute banger 90s magazine CD that I ever encountered.<p>It didn't just have Demos of new games, if you poked around you'd find that it had "this cool program called Scream Tracker 3" and a whole bunch of these ".MOD files" that played music that sounded like a CD![0]<p>[0] - Well, it was the 90s, and typical bundled multimedia speakers were so bad you couldn't tell the difference...
> I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.<p>What kind of college doesn't allow students to leave for lunch? Lord.
Probably a US high school, where off-campus lunch is usually reserved for older students.
Others covered it. This was high school, not college. :) it was upperclassmen only and your parents or bad grades could get the privilege revoked.<p>School grounds are also commonly called campuses in the US, not just colleges. Our high school called it “off-campus lunch”.
High school ... 20+ years ago probably
Decades later Apple put U2 on everyone's iPhone and people got mad... (/s, yeah the album was a gift on people's account, ready to download to the phone but not taking space otherwise, but I would've found it obnoxious too).<p>This video was also on the CD: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc</a> .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Sony wasted several gigs of the very small (32g to 120g) and very expensive ssds of the time with <i>2</i> copies of a Spider Man 3 movie pre-loaded onto several different laptops. One copy in the normal installed fs, another copy in the recovery partition.<p>And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.<p>You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.
The perception was: my iTunes library is <i>mine</i>, and it's invasive for Apple to put something in there without my permission.<p>Whereas: the Windows 95 CD is Microsoft's, Microsoft is free to put what they want on there. I bet most people who weren't nerds or curious kids never even found it!
Music videos on the Windows 95 CD didn't occupy space on your hard disk, either. As long as the operating system still fit on the CD-ROM, it didn't matter what other extras were on it.
And at the same time, Apple claimed it was the biggest ever album release by number of downloads, or something like that. They were not only messing with our libraries, they were claiming we wanted it and were in fact U2 fans.
Totally. Windows CD was a gift box to explore, nothing in it was intrusive.
Because it auto-played when you didn't want to.<p>If you had Spotify running and then pressed the quick-play on your phones it would continue where it was, but after a reboot the iPhone would auto-play from Apple Music instead if Spotify hadn't been started.<p>So tapping play on your headphones would start those damn U2 songs "by accident" because it's the only thing that was on the Apple Music accounts we aren't using.. yeah no thanks.
There was something about iTunes at that time where every time I started my car it would connect to my phone and start playing that U2 album regardless of what I had been listening to earlier. It just would not go away.
There's still something about CarPlay that does that kind of thing but not tied to a specific song. I'll be in my car listening to the car's radio, with my phone on its mount but inactive and all is well. The phone connected wirelessly to CarPlay when I started the car, but I'm not using any CarPlay features on this trip.<p>Then I need to activate the phone (say I'm pulling into the McDonalds parking lot and need to look at the McD app to get my drive thru pickup code for my order), so I tap it and swipe up...and the car switches to playing in whatever app I last used in CarPlay such as Podcasts or Spotify.<p>If I hit the media button to bring up the car's media selection screen and switch it back to radio that plays for a few seconds and then it switches back to CarPlay.<p>If on the phone I go to the now playing thingy in control center and hit the gizmo for selecting where to play I can explicitly switch it from CarPlay to iPhone Speaker and then it stops messing with the radio.<p>Some Googling and some asking LLMs turned up that a lot of people have problems with CarPlay overriding the car's entertainment system and apparently nobody has a fully satisfactory way to deal with it. Some people have addressed it by using Shortcuts automation to pause playback whenever the phone wakes up. They still get interrupted, but at least it doesn't keep interrupting.
I have a 2010 Honda. I found a usb port in the glove box. When I plug in my phone there is a 50% chance it will start playing my iTunes library alphabetically. (I get a Neville Brothers song, which isn’t so bad, I put it in there)
> holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!<p>Or 11 years, when the scandal was that the president wore a tan suit [1]:<p>> U.S. representative Peter King, a member of the Republican Party, deemed the suit's color combined with the subject matter of terrorism to be "unpresidential". He went on: "There's no way, I don't think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching"<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controversy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...</a>
Nobody cared because nobody knew what an mp3 was in 1995. Most people - everyone but a minority of tech-minded audio producers - considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty. It took another four years until the public started to associate a music collection with the computer (ie: 1999, when Napster came out).
That’s a very confident recount given that it’s completely false. Good for you that you’ve memory-holed it. But don’t turn around and act like everyone else was insane.<p>Maybe you don’t remember iTunes mechanics at the time, but this “gift” as you call it would get in the way <i>all the time</i>. I’d always end up accidentally playing it. It’d always be present in library views when I did not care for it. It couldn’t be truly removed until Apple built a custom web page where you could request it to be removed from your account.
I think there were two problems with the U2 thing...<p>First, U2's general public perception as far as grandstanding[0]...<p>I think the bigger subconscious part was, at the time, Apple stuff was still premium price compared to most other brands, and the consumer perceived price of a U2 album, i.e. "It would cost me 10-15$ to buy this at Media Play^W^W FYE^W Best buy or wherever, couldn't they have made the contract price 10-15$ (which back then may have been as much as 5-10% of cost) cheaper"?<p>Cause I know an ex-partner bitched about that.<p>And, to other's comments, they bitched about the bono stuff popping up randomly playing music...[1]<p>[0] - I mean there was a whole south park episode about Bono's grandstanding...<p>[1] - Interestingly, the South Park episode was good therapy for her.
I don’t remember U2 being a gift being ready to download. It was automatically put on all my devices in iTunes. I think it’s still there but I use Spotify instead of iPods and iTunes.
Imagine that's the worst that happens to "your" library. Good times. We really need to bring the idea of ownership back.<p><a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-from-peoples-libraries/" rel="nofollow">https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-f...</a><p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deletion-from-kindle-examined" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...</a>
Apple also put the music video for The Old Apartment by Barenaked Ladies on the Mac OS 8 CD.
It was much worse than just adding it to your library as a gift. The cover art for the album[1] would appear in seemingly random places on your phone. And there was literally zero way to remove it, until there was such an uproar that Apple had to make a special tool.<p>Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.<p>1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.
Honestly it was the cover art and title, not the album itself. Without context, it’s easy for all of our internet-jaded minds to get a very wrong idea about what the album relates to.<p>And your music library is a very personal thing. For some people, it represents part of their identity. It can feel wrong to have something you may not like or agree with stuck in there.
Edie is also married to Paul Simon of all people. The story of how they got together is very sweet.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRBcsiUnk44" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRBcsiUnk44</a>
'Consensual' sex between a 50 year old President - the most powerful man in the world - and a 21 year old intern. Yeah right.<p>Clinton had a decades-long history of being a sexual predator. He was repeatedly accused of rape. He was also active with his friendship with Epstein during those years, which I think everybody understands what that means at this point.
> let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal<p>You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?
Don't worry. The current president is mentioned in those files "over a million times" according to a congressperson.<p>Thankfully nothing will be done, of course. Rome truly is in decline
I’m a huge fan of “be that as it may” to stop arguments that are essentially “yeah, but…!” This is a prime example.<p>BE THAT AS IT MAY, that’s not what we are talking about. This isn’t a Facebook comments section.
The point remains. Back then, one ordinary affair was a scandal. Now, the president can rape many little girls and throw the resulting babies out to sea and nothing happens to him, it's not a scandal.
Few months ago I learnt there's Edie Brickell's Good Times video on Win 95 CD:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE</a><p>There's also Weezer? Whoa. Of course I did experience Win 95. My 1st PC (96/97 ??) came with it. Never bother to mess with the instalation CD, though.
Crowding around our first ever computer, a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of RAM and a 1.6gb hard disk, watching that Weezer video on the CRT monitor with my whole family is a cherished memory.
As a teenager I found this video on the Windows 95 CD without context and for some time after I thought that Weezer was a 60's band that just had a style way ahead of their time.
Our family's Packard Bell in 1996 came with a full-motion video game called Silent Steel. Coming from a 486, FMV video games sure felt like the future.<p>It was pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure, but with video. You had to know the exact sequence of actions to get to a "good" ending, and apparently there were several endings. For the mid 90's, the script, acting, and sets (and CGI) were actually not half-bad. But mapping out all the choices that didn't kill you while watching the same set of clips over and over was not as much fun as it sounds.
That sounds really familiar—I think that must have been on my Packard Bell from that era too.<p>Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic.<p>I also remember this recording (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop</a>) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.
Yeah it was mayo clinic.<p>Also there was packard bell navigator. I still have all the shovelware cds from that machine. Other stuff was Tuneland, which was narrated by howie mandel and my little brother loved, Sports Illustrated clips, and some weird not very good reference books. Maybe there were some creation tool demos, I vaguely remember corel draw and some 3d took.<p>It was never clear to me if the journeyman project was a demo or a full game- I remember getting stuck pretty quickly.
Sega CD had several games like that too. "Night Trap" was the most well known, and gained some notoriety for a bit of laughably tame footage.
that style of game came and went fairly quickly, for good reasons.
> Some time ago, I noted that the Windows 95 CD contained a variety of multimedia extras<p>That "some time ago" is 20 years ago. It is crazy that Raymond has been able to consistently write historical yet fun blog posts for decades. What a dedication.
I personally prefer Windows XP including David Byrne's "Like Humans Do" as the demo track for Windows Media Player<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMeivIkwf_I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMeivIkwf_I</a>
Apple put Barenaked Ladies’ The Old Apartment video on the Mac OS 8 CD as a QuickTime demo
Any time you get mad about a streaming service who seems to have changed music or a credits clip for a TV show or movie, this is basically why.<p>To get the rights to use things in technologies that didn't exist when the media was created, you often have to go back to everyone involved and get their permission. Sometimes they don't say yes, or they aren't findable, or just aren't alive, and it's not clear who owns the rights anymore.<p>This isn't as much of a problem with newer media, because contracts now specify what happens with new technologies, but old contracts were often limited to specific technologies.
This is quite short and doesn't really contain any insights or details that aren't simply obvious or easily assumed.
Yeah, it's a shame. I usually enjoy Raymond Chen's posts, but this doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting other than that the band didn't know. The main question I have is: why this video? What's the story behind the choice?
IIRC there was also an Edie Brickell video.
The art of storytell—
This music video was the reason we decided to upgrade the CD-ROM drive on our family computer, since it could not play without stuttering on our existing one.
Henry Winkler (the Fonz) went on to become a big-name Hollywood producer—he executive produced the original MacGyver—so he was probably one of the easiest to contact.
The Weezer video was quirky, funny, creative, catchy and appealing to multiple generations. A stroke of genius by Microsoft.
Back in 1997 or so I bought an ATI video card that also had a Weezer video on the CD. I remember being amazed that it could play the video at 1024x768 with just a little bit of tearing.
IIRC, I was able to watch the videos on my 486. It was quite something being able to do that l, while in Windows 95 and switching between apps. Prior to that, I’d only seen FMV in a few video games.
"Hey, did anyone try the fish tonight?"<p>"It's not so good, Al"
It's well known that Bill Gates's favorite band is Weezer, so this feels unsurprising.
Licensing?
This is Edie Brickell erasure!
I must confess that these kind of corporate storie make me throw up in my mouth.
(Yes, I have karma to burn, hit me)