Sometimes I'll boot up an old Mac just to hear that chime. it's silly, I know, but that one second sound just does something to me. like a switch flipping in my head, a "yeah, today's gonna be a good one." tbh I think most of us have one like that, the PS1 swoosh, the Windows 95 chord, that AOL "you've got mail", etc, etc.

I started looking into who wrote these and got pulled in deep. Brian Eno wrote Windows 95 on a Mac (he hated PCs lol). Ryuichi Sakamoto, THE Sakamoto, wrote Dreamcast, and Sega didn't even put his name on the box. The PS1 chime was made by a Japanese composer named Takafumi Fujisawa who got two days in the studio and was told "make it feel like walking into a cinema." Two days. One second of audio. Defined a generation.

I get they're "just sounds", a few seconds of audio engineered for tinny speakers, but the thought, the constraint, the people behind them. I have just been in Awe.

I couldn't get this out of my head for a few weeks lol, so I made an interactive version of the whole thing, for anyone to play with. 39 chimes from 1977 to today, click any device to hear it, sidebar tells you who made it and why.