Windows 95 goes on sale at midnight, three US peacemakers come home from Bosnia, and Blur KOs Oasis

Good morning. It's Thursday, people camped outside CompUSA overnight to buy an operating system, and no, that is not a typo. Grab a Hi-C Ecto Cooler and let's boot up your five minutes in 1995.

What's Happening Here

🖥️ America lined up at midnight for software, and Windows 95 is finally here

What's going on? At 12:01 this morning, stores from Egghead to Best Buy threw open the doors and let the crowds in, and the crowds were real: hundreds of people stood in line in the dark to hand over roughly ninety bucks for a box of disks. Today Microsoft makes it official with a carnival on its Redmond campus, Jay Leno riffing alongside Bill Gates, the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" carpet-bombing every commercial break, and the Empire State Building lit up last night in the four Windows colors. Microsoft even bought the entire print run of London's Times and handed it out free.

Inside the box: a Start button, a taskbar, long filenames that finally beat the old eight-letter limit, and "plug and play" that promises your printer will just work. It comes on one CD-ROM or, if you're brave, thirteen floppy disks.

The rewind: For a decade the personal computer meant squinting at a C:\ prompt or wrestling clunky Windows 3.1 while Macintosh owners smugly pointed and clicked. Microsoft has reportedly poured a couple hundred million dollars into changing that, the biggest launch the software business has ever seen, all to convince you the machine belongs in the den, not just the cubicle.

Why it matters: This is the moment Microsoft is betting the PC stops being an office appliance and becomes a thing families actually want at home.

What's Happening in the World

🕊️ Three American peacemakers came home in flag-draped caskets, and the Bosnia push goes on

What's going on? This week the United States buried the cost of trying to end Europe's worst war since 1945. Diplomats Robert Frasure, Joseph Kruzel, and Nelson Drew were killed last Saturday when their armored vehicle slid off the treacherous Mount Igman dirt track, the only road into besieged Sarajevo, and tumbled down the mountainside. Their remains returned home this week, met at Andrews Air Force Base by a grim President Clinton.

The man leading the mission, envoy Richard Holbrooke, survived the crash and is already reassembling his team to head back to the Balkans and restart the shuttle diplomacy the accident interrupted.

The rewind: Bosnia's war is into its fourth blood-soaked year. The UN "safe area" of Srebrenica fell to Serb forces in July, and after years of hand-wringing Washington has finally stepped forward to broker a peace, sending its own people onto some of the most dangerous roads on earth to do it.

Why it matters: America has put its own lives on the table to stop this war, which means it now owns the outcome.

Watercooler Talk

🎸 Blur just beat Oasis in a chart duel Britain covered like a title fight

What's going on? For once the biggest story out of London was a pop single. Britpop's two heavyweight bands, Blur and Oasis, deliberately released rival singles on the same day, and the whole country spent the week watching the sales race like a horse at Ascot. Sunday's chart delivered the verdict: Blur's jaunty "Country House" landed at No. 1 with about 274,000 copies, edging Oasis's "Roll With It" at roughly 216,000. It led the evening news.

The rewind: The Battle of Britpop is really a battle over who Britain is. Blur are art-school southerners, Oasis are swaggering working-class Mancunians, and the tabloids have happily framed it as posh versus lad, north versus south. Underneath the feud is a wave of guitar bands that spent the last two years elbowing American grunge off British radio.

Why it matters: A singles chart became a national mirror, and that same guitar-band wave is starting to wash up on this side of the Atlantic.

Fast Forward

• 🔥 Long Island's Pine Barrens are ablaze, A wildfire that erupted out near the Hamptons is tearing through the eastern end of Long Island this morning, already charring some 6,000 acres and pushing firefighters and evacuations across Suffolk County.
• 🎓 The Citadel is all-male again, Days after becoming the first woman ever admitted to the storied South Carolina military college, Shannon Faulkner quit this week, worn down by illness and isolation after a two-and-a-half-year court fight just to walk through the gate.
• 💰 Wall Street keeps printing records, The Dow industrials are flirting with new highs again this week, closing above 4,600 as a bull market fed by low inflation and tech optimism shrugs off every jitter.
• 🎬 Banderas brings a guitar case full of guns, Robert Rodriguez's blood-soaked Desperado, with Salma Hayek co-starring, rides into theaters tomorrow, the flashy big-budget sequel to his shoestring cult hit El Mariachi.
• ⚾ Cleveland's closer makes history, Indians reliever Jose Mesa slammed the door on his 38th straight save last night, a new major-league record, as the runaway AL Central leaders keep steamrolling toward October.
• 🎾 The last Slam of summer serves off Monday, The US Open opens next week in Flushing Meadows, with Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, and a red-hot Steffi Graf all chasing hardcourt crowns under the Queens jet noise.

Wait, What?

💾 The most important thing in Windows 95 costs an extra $49.95

Tucked inside a companion pack called Microsoft Plus!, on sale alongside today's blockbuster launch, is a slim little program named Internet Explorer, Microsoft's very first stab at a web browser. Nobody's lining up for it; the crowds want the Start button. But a scrappy Silicon Valley upstart called Netscape already owns the web, and Redmond has just quietly announced it's coming for that too.

Before You Log Off

📼 🎵

Your 8 PM remote fight: NBC leans on Must See Thursday reruns of Mad About You and ER, Fox counters with Martin and Living Single, CBS floats a made-for-TV movie, or you surrender to ABC's PrimeTime Live.

📼 Video store pick: Pulp Fiction, finally out on the rental wall after its long run in theaters, a two-night dose of Jules, Vincent, and one very bad day for a briefcase.

🎵 Single pick: Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio, the Dangerous Minds anthem worth grabbing on cassingle at Sam Goody before every kid on the block already has it.

What you want to buy today: a shrink-wrapped Windows 95 box, a Packard Bell tower to run it on, and a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks, because apparently thirteen of them equals a whole operating system.

Your answering machine message, if anyone asks:

you've reached the machine. i'm somewhere on floppy disk nine of thirteen and i've lost the will to live. leave it at the beep.