My PC’s start-up sound is set to Windows 95.
I’m fond of 98’s too, but I absolutely adore 95’s fully ambient sound.
It’s well known that it was composed by none other than Brian Eno, and last year it was apparently preserved by the US Library of Congress as a significant recording. Well, well — that makes perfect sense.
I first heard this sound in my last years of primary school.
After the PC’s busy ‘grrr… clack-clack-clack-clack’ and an endless wait for it to boot up came this ‘catharsis for the ears’.
I envy the grown-ups of that time.
After all, they got to hear this sound on a PC they’d saved up so hard to buy. They must have been thrilled to bits. In today’s world of instant start-ups, I doubt anyone will ever feel that again.
These days, Solitaire seems to be about the only pre-installed game left, but back on 95 I was hooked on Hover!. You ride a hovering car (?) and try to grab more flags faster than the computer — and, believe it or not, you can now play it in your browser. The graphics are prettier than they used to be, and there’s even multiplayer (!). The pinball game that came later with Windows Me was simple but great fun, too. As for Solitaire and Minesweeper, I was just a child — I couldn’t make head nor tail of the rules (lol).
Recently, Kairu — the dolphin Office Assistant who was Japan’s counterpart to Clippy — made a surprise comeback in Copilot Keyboard, a Japanese input app for Win11. Sadly, though, he now just sits there on the screen. Back in the day, he had all sorts of animations, like tropical fish swimming around him. I do wish Microsoft would rediscover a bit of that old sense of play.
Perhaps it’s just nostalgia talking, but I think the ’90s were a time full of momentum, fuelled by the excitement of the approaching year 2000.
Remember PostPet? Do you know Momo, the pink bear? PostPet was an email client in which a pet of your choosing — Momo, or a rabbit, a cat, a dog, a robot and more — would deliver your emails for you. You could raise your pet, and there was a collecting element too. I had a cat named Jin (even though I’m a dog person).
At the time, I was a member of the paid PostPet Park service, and I think that’s when I first discovered the internet. There was no fibre broadband yet, and ADSL either didn’t exist or had only just started… The internet wasn’t widespread, so it was expensive to use, and I don’t think there were any flat-rate plans. Perhaps that’s exactly why every exchange with strangers on message boards felt so precious — I savoured them character by character.
At primary school, we got to use a drawing program called KID PIX. Whenever you drew a line or filled in a shape, it made sounds like ‘sha-la-la-la-la’ and ‘glug-glug-glug’!
I suspect it was this sense of play, found everywhere back then, that made me fall in love with PCs.
When I got to secondary school, I made a friend who knew all about dōjin (fan-made works), and that’s how I discovered personal websites.
She introduced me to some incredibly talented artists. I admired them, practically lived on their sites, felt painfully aware of my own lack of drawing skills, admired them some more… and round and round I went. If I could, I’d tell my younger self — who only admired them, never studied drawing at all and spent her time chatting nonsense in oekaki chat rooms (where people drew together in real time) — to borrow Shohei Ohtani’s famous words: ‘Let’s stop admiring them.’
There was no social media back then, so instead of everything looking the same, everyone built their own unique spaces.
I think I started hearing the word ‘blog’ a little later, and a bit after that came Twitter and YouTube. The early days were lovely, weren’t they — the early days.
Let me say this plainly: I can’t stand social media as it is today.
However much social media evolves, I want to stick with personal websites.
I feel that who someone is, what they love and what they want to share shows through in the design and the words of their site.
On social media, short posts make it hard to grasp what someone really means, the design is fixed, and whether or not you pay changes how loud your voice is. Good posts get drowned out, influence depends on the number of likes, and then along comes paid content — and the magic is gone. I don’t know much about how things are abroad, but is it just me, or do Japan’s ‘viral’ posts all sound alike? The language feels trite, as though it’s been turned into a template.
Oops, I’ve got a bit carried away.
What I’m trying to say is that personal websites are the best. To bring back those days, if only within myself, I went looking for directory sites that support personal websites and signed up. My heart was pounding.
I found the world I’d been looking for!!
One after another, I came across sites brimming with that handmade HTML feel I’d hardly seen in years! Honestly! Where have you all been all this time?! (lol)
They’re scattered with precious treasures. Every site shines with its creator’s care and attention, and it brought me close to tears. The ’90s fonts and background colours can be a little hard to read (sorry!), but that makes them feel new, somehow. Rather than being swept away by today’s flood of information, these people are sharing their own thoughts. Their unique designs, visitor counters, guestbooks, message boards… I don’t think social media could ever capture the warmth that’s unique to personal websites.
I hope this site, too, can carry the spirit of the ’90s while bringing something new. Especially in the indie web scene, both in Japan and abroad, attitudes towards AI are harsh — but I won’t be discouraged. I want to keep sharing my thoughts, little by little.
🎃A single click might help brighten someone’s future.🎃