The Windows 95 startup sound was composed on a Mac

Product: the Windows 95 startup sound, composed on a Macintosh. Author: Brian Eno, the English musician who produced Talking Heads and worked with David Bowie. He said so himself in a 1996 interview: he made it on a Mac and had never used a PC in his life.

The brief: the agency sent him an enormous list of adjectives —inspiring, universal, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional— and at the bottom of the page, one genuinely serious constraint: it had to last three and a quarter seconds.

Method: Eno said that absurd list pulled him out of three straight weeks without a single idea, and that he wrote eighty-four tiny pieces before settling on this one.

Performance: it played on 24 August 1995 on tens of millions of computers, and there are still people who recognise it from two notes.

Rating: five stars. The sixth goes to the Mac.