Should we delve into the , or

The year is 2004. Your bedroom is a sanctuary of beige plastic and the hum of a cathode-ray tube monitor. You’ve just finished downloading a new desktop background from a fan site that took three minutes to load over DSL. It is the iconic , perfectly fitted for your 1024x768 resolution screen.

As the monitor flickers, you realize that while the resolution might be low, the feeling is hi-def. You hit the power button, the screen shrinks to a single white dot and vanishes, but the image stays burned into your retinas—a red streak of rebellion in the dark.

The bright red tongue slices through the gray of the Windows XP taskbar like a defiant shout. To most people, it’s just a graphic designed by John Pasche in 1970, but to you, sitting in the glow of that monitor, it is a portal.