Damn, I was expecting a searchable archive of different types of boots (hiking, combat, riding, etc) striking pavement or other surfaces. Not sure why, but that's what I thought of when I heard "boot sounds".

Something like this? ;)

http://www.hollywoodedge.com/Foley-Footsteps-Sonic-Boon-P39....

Foley is a pretty interesting area for one whose ultimate aim is to be completely unnoticed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_artist

Interesting background on the Windows 95 Startup sound early in this interview with Brian Eno: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar...

Give me some time and I'll capture some of my machines.

But it's strange to hear the Apple II beep and not hear a 5.15" floppy doing it's initial scan.

Man, the amiga one was rather epic.

You didn't listen to the Indy, did you? The shutdown sound is equally surprising.

Some more SGI boot/shutdown sounds here http://www.spam-filter.de/irix/sgi_kultmusik?s[]=irix

This is some part of the magic that makes me still own an Indy and an Octane...

I have fond memories of the Mac Plus disk scan sound and startup beep as a kid. But then one day, the computer delivery guy came by with a Mac Centris 660AV, set it up, and turned it on. The orchestral chime blew my freaking mind. I literally felt hairs standing up on my neck.

edit: The Mac Plus sounded like the "Macintosh SE" file, and the Centris is marked as Quadra AV there, since they renamed the Centris line later.

When the robot Wall-E, from the movie by pixar, wakes up in the morning he makes the Macintosh PowerBook sound: http://titan08.free.fr/Boot%20Sounds/PowerMac%20PCI%20-%20Bo...

BTW, the MacinTalk software is listed as the voice of the villain robot in the same movie.

Apologies for my ignorance, but what's Indy? I'm assuming it's not related to the race of the same name.

Also notice that "Titan" made some wonderful DVDs of amiga demos and game compilations. He's a great Amiga specialist (he wrote some well known games on the platform back in the time, too IIRC).

What's with the white banner iframe following the page-scroll..?

It used to be an ad box. Not sure why it's currently white.

It's still an adbox with flash in it that displays properly on my Nexus1, but on my desktop PC, it's just the white box.

Windows NT is still the most epic one to me, being the inspiration of the library startup sound prank, it would seem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPQDKZmhD9A