40 Fun Facts About Microsoft Windows

Which Friends actor joined Jennifer Aniston in the 30-minute "cyber sitcom" video guide that shipped with Windows 95?

Matthew Perry's sitcom tour arrived with a genuine hit: Windows 95 shipped one million copies worldwide in just four days.

What is the name of Windows XP's default wallpaper, a photo of green hills under a blue sky in California?

Bliss was shot on film in January 1996 near the Napa–Sonoma county line, on a hill cleared of its vines by a phylloxera infestation years earlier.

Which ambient musician composed "The Microsoft Sound", the six-second start-up chime of Windows 95, in 1994?

Brian Eno later admitted on BBC Radio 4 that he composed the Windows chime on a rival machine: "I wrote it on a Mac."

Which New York landmark was lit up in the four colours of the Windows logo to celebrate the Windows 95 launch?

The Empire State Building had company in Canada, where a 100-metre Windows 95 banner was hung down the side of Toronto's CN Tower.

Which Microsoft operating system of October 2012 was the first public release since 1995 to ship without a Start button?

Windows 8 treated the desktop as just another app, and the complaints were loud enough that Windows 8.1 put the Start button back a year later.

Which version number did Microsoft skip entirely when naming the 2015 successor to Windows 8.1?

Windows 9 was passed over because, in Terry Myerson's words, "it wouldn't be right to call it Windows 9" given how different the product was.

Windows 3.0 bundled Solitaire in 1990 partly to teach nervous new users which mouse technique?

Drag and drop practice was the cover story: Microsoft said the game was there "to soothe people intimidated by the operating system".

Which puzzle game joined the standard Windows 3.1 install in 1992 after debuting in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack?

Minesweeper hooked its own boss: Bill Gates was so addicted he used to sneak into a colleague's office after work to play.

The two-letter suffix of Windows XP, unveiled under that name in February 2001, was short for which word?

Experience was the marketing gloss on the first consumer Windows not built on the Windows 95 kernel, uniting the home and business lines on Windows NT.

Which Windows 10 voice assistant took its name, and its US voice, from an AI character in Microsoft's Halo games?

Cortana's US voice was Jen Taylor, the actress who had voiced the Halo character since the games began, while the UK version used Ginnie Watson.

On which day of the week does Microsoft ship its monthly batch of Windows security fixes, a routine formalised in 2003?

Patch Tuesday falls on the second Tuesday of each month and was introduced in October 2003 to cut the cost of patching after the Blaster worm.

What did Windows 95 call its holding area for deleted files, a feature Apple's Macintosh had long known as the Trash?

The Recycle Bin arrived with Windows 95 alongside the new Windows Explorer, as a place to review deleted files and folders before they are gone for good.

Which browser debuted as the new default in Windows 10 in 2015, pushing Internet Explorer into maintenance mode?

Microsoft Edge was torn down and rebuilt on Google's open-source Chromium engine from late 2018, abandoning Microsoft's own EdgeHTML.

Which US city served as Microsoft's codename for Windows 95 while the 32-bit system was in development?

Chicago ran in parallel with "Cairo", a planned Windows NT-based successor with an object-based file system that never shipped as such.

Windows 11's taskbar moved its buttons to which position by default, a first in the history of the operating system?

The centre-aligned bar is also pinned to the bottom of the screen for good; unlike earlier versions it cannot be dragged to another side without editing the registry.

Windows 10's revived Start menu bolted which feature of its tile-based predecessor onto the classic list of programs?

Live tiles sat on the right of a menu modelled on Windows 7's, a compromise Terry Myerson first showed at Microsoft's Build conference before the name was even announced.

What did the 2012 redesign of the blue screen of death add that was left out of Japanese and Windows Server editions?

A sad-face emoticon was joined in 2016 by a QR code, added to Windows 10 so users could scan their way to a troubleshooting page.

Which browser lost the 1995–2001 "first browser war" once Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows?

Netscape Navigator had dominated 1995, but free bundling let Internet Explorer reach a peak of about 95% usage share by 2003.

What did the "Me" in Windows Me, the last release built on the Windows 9x line, officially stand for?

Millennium Edition was so unloved that PC World renamed it the "Mistake Edition" and ranked it fourth among the worst tech products of all time.

Which Windows 7 feature maximises a window dragged to the top of the screen, or docks it to half when dragged sideways?

Aero Snap helped make Windows 7 Microsoft's fastest-selling operating system, with more than 100 million copies sold in its first six months.

Windows 1.0 was mocked for one layout rule that Windows 2.0 scrapped in 1987: what could its panes not do?

Overlap one another was exactly what Apple objected to: the overlapping look in Windows 2.0 triggered its 1988 copyright lawsuit, which Microsoft won.

Plugging which device into a Windows 98 demo PC at COMDEX 1998 crashed it to a blue screen before Bill Gates?

A scanner was meant to show off Plug and Play; Gates's reply to the crowd's applause was "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet."

Which Windows Vista security feature dims the whole screen and asks permission before an app may alter core settings?

User Account Control's incessant prompts topped the list of Vista complaints, alongside driver incompatibility and its steep hardware demands.

What was the name of Windows XP's default blue-and-green visual theme, which some users dismissed as childish?

Luna had an exclusive sibling, the Royale theme, which was reserved for Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Internet Explorer 1.0 was sold in 1995 not inside Windows 95 itself but in which separate add-on pack?

Microsoft Plus! was pitched mainly on its themes and disk compression, so most people first met the browser preinstalled by PC makers rather than in a shop.

Which band's "Buddy Holly" music video was included among the "Fun Stuff" on the Windows 95 CD-ROM?

Weezer shared the disc with Edie Brickell's "Good Times", a trailer for the film Rob Roy and the 3D bumper-car game Hover!

Which board game shipped with Windows 1.0 in 1985 after plans for Chess and a puzzle title were scrapped?

Reversi sat alongside Calculator, Paintbrush, Notepad, Write and Clock in a package that sold for US$99 at launch.

Which scalable font format, developed by Apple, did Windows 3.1 adopt in 1992 as a rival to Adobe Type Manager?

TrueType was Apple's late-1980s answer to Adobe's Type 1 PostScript fonts, and Microsoft's adoption made it the default on both platforms.

Which roll-back feature, letting a PC be returned to an earlier snapshot of its files, made its debut in Windows Me?

System Restore shipped with a date-stamping bug that could mislabel any snapshot taken after September 8, 2001.

Windows 11 ran Android apps through a partnership with which company's app store, starting in the United States in 2022?

Amazon's Appstore client reached US users on February 15, 2022, riding on the new Windows Subsystem for Android.

Which future Microsoft CEO wrote the text of Windows 3.1's Ctrl+Alt+Del screen, often mistaken for a crash screen?

Steve Ballmer's screen was a rudimentary task manager, not a crash, as Raymond Chen pointed out when the press credited him with inventing the BSOD.

Which pinball table, first sold in Maxis's Full Tilt! Pinball, came free with Windows from NT 4.0 through XP?

Space Cadet vanished after XP because of a collision-detection bug in an early 64-bit port that Microsoft could not fix in time.

Windows RT, sold only preloaded on tablets such as the first Surface, was built for which processor architecture?

ARM's power efficiency promised thinner devices and longer battery life, but Windows RT could not run ordinary desktop programs, which store staff often explained wrongly.

Which Microsoft console's November 2015 system update swapped its original core for one built on Windows 10?

Xbox One thereby gained Universal Windows Platform apps, and Polygon said Microsoft had erased the distinction between console and PC.

Which icon-grid shell fronted Windows 3.x until the Start menu, desktop and taskbar took over in 1995?

Program Manager descended from Desktop Manager, the shell of OS/2 1.2, and itself replaced the MS-DOS Executive file manager as the default Windows shell.

Which card game, obscure until Windows 95 bundled it, had all but one of its 32,000 numbered deals proven winnable?

FreeCell deal #11982 was the lone holdout of the Internet FreeCell Project, a crowdsourced effort that ran from August 1994 to April 1995.

Which engineer, hired away from Digital Equipment Corporation in 1988, led the team that built Windows NT?

Dave Cutler is said to have picked the initials WNT as a play on his old DEC system VMS, advancing each letter by one.

Windows 10 was developed under which codename, borrowed from a planet in Microsoft's Halo games?

Threshold was first reported by Mary Jo Foley in December 2013 as a "wave of operating systems" across Microsoft's platforms rather than a single release.

Which progressive-rock guitarist recorded the four-note Windows Vista start-up sound at Microsoft's own studios?

Robert Fripp made it in collaboration with Tucker Martine, and the sessions were filmed for a behind-the-scenes video.

Which Pentagram partner turned the waving Windows flag into a flat, four-pane window for the 2012 logo redesign?

Paula Scher's four panes shipped with the 2012 release that also renamed Windows Explorer as File Explorer.