August 31, 2015

A Big Mac cost $4.79 that summer of 2015, and the Dow Jones sat at 17,425 — just as European leaders were holding urgent emergency meetings over whether Greece would collapse and take the eurozone with it. On screens and speakers that summer, "Game of Thrones" was pulling in Emmy wins as the defining drama of its era, while Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth's "See You Again" sat at number one on the charts for weeks running. Harper Lee's long-awaited second novel "Go Set a Watchman" landed on shelves in July and immediately topped the New York Times fiction list, selling over a million copies in its first week. On July 29, Microsoft released Windows 10 as a free upgrade to existing users worldwide, marking the first time the company had ever offered a major operating system at no cost and signaling a fundamental shift in how the tech industry thought about software distribution.