The shift key trick to quickly restart Windows 95 wasn't a placebo, it was a neat little system to avoid a full PC reboot

Back in the 1990s, my fellow PC chums and I thought we had stumbled across a magic trick with Windows 95, something that we thought nobody else knew about: holding the shift key when you hit restart just fired up the operating system again, not the whole PC. Alas, it turns out that we were all just very naive, and Microsoft's software engineers had deliberately coded this functionality.

Yes, I know that's blatantly obvious—it's not like Windows 95 was created out of mystic spells and ground up weevils—but back then...