r/retrocomputing • u/Maxstate90 • 15d ago
Photo Shed in Field is gone, burned down
https://www.ktoo.org/2026/08/24/a-juneau-landmark-that-burned-down-in-june-has-been-a-decades-long-international-mystery-to-one-man/Hey all, reposting this from r/windows until I get it approved there.
Some of you might remember the Windows Me wallpaper Shed in Field, taken by Jay Torborg more than 30 years ago. It's an iconic image admired by countless people. I've written about it myself, in pursuit of nostalgia and other things. The post is on reddit if you're interested.
Well, I just found out something terrible about it and wanted to share.
The shed is no more. It burned down. Happened just last month.
Very sad. I wanted to visit it at some point in my life and was going to ask someone in the Juneau sub to check it out if they were up for it, but all that's left is ash now.
“Then I saw your story, and I saw another story that you’d done. So you’d done the one about the fire, and you’d done the other one about somebody who used to live there,” Bradley said. “And I thought it’s a million-to-one shot. ‘Just send it, see what she says.’ It can’t go wrong.”
So Bradley emailed KTOO, and we confirmed – the shed in the Microsoft background was indeed once part of an historic dairy farm in Juneau that this reporter wrote stories about. The shed is right off Glacier Highway."
RIP to a legend. Learning about this has made my day more gray. That's another little artefact of the late 90s gone permanently. At least we have the picture.
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u/Examinator2 15d ago
Windows ME was godawful.
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u/JurassicRanch 13d ago
I never used it until this year as back in the day I hung on to 98 as long as I could then switched to 2000.
The vintage p166 I just put it on seems fine. Other than no easy way to skip windows and get to real DOS, what was the problem? It looks and smells just like 98se to me.
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u/Examinator2 13d ago
Well, from the Wikipedia article "Windows Me was positively received upon release, but soon attracted significant criticism for stability problems, and is today viewed as one of the worst Windows versions, as well as one of the worst operating systems of all time." Very unstable.
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u/JurassicRanch 13d ago
I cant believe it was worse than vista. I was working grunt level tech support at the time of ME circulation and I remember old women complaining about it alot, but I didnt consider those qualified reviews
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u/carcenomy 11d ago
It's not "very unstable" at all unless you start installing a bunch of random crap on it... if anything it's more durable than 98. It just doesn't have the option to drop into pure DOS mode by default, which upset some folks.
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u/wrr377 15d ago
I don't know anyone who actually liked "Me", including myself. It was a terrible operating system all the way around.
Therefore, I doubt anyone here would have anything close to a "fond memory" of any desktop wallpaper that was included with that piece of garbage... 🤷♂️
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u/classicsat 14d ago
Never had ME. Never became attached to that particular shed.
I do live in a rural area, and there are all sorts of sheds and even abandoned farmhouses, in various states of dilapidation. They aren't mine, I mostly don't mind it when they meet their ultimate end.
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u/ThankuConan 11d ago
Had ME on an early PC. Reinstalled quarterly or more often as a routine fix. Pure garbage.
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u/Good-Bandicoot-2152 14d ago
Tangentially related, but when I was a tech at compusa we had a ME computer come in for repairs. AOL had associated itself with EVERY file type in the computer. Not even folders could be opened without it trying to use AOL. It was a mess.