While speech synthesizers existed well before that, most people didn't have a user-friendly way to play with them. This is also how many young people learned not to download things just because they're free.īonzi's speech engine (part of the Microsoft Agent suite), was a huge novelty around the time it was released in 1999.
BonziBuddy was free, so there seemed to be no harm in downloading it.
This meant that anyone from eight year olds to their grandmothers could download the "cute purple monkey" and play with it just for fun. Third-party developer BONZI Software used Peedy as the first version of its standalone helper program "BonziBUDDY." Microsoft had intended these assistants to be bundled with other programs, but Bonzi's assistant was designed to help with everything. It would sit on your desktop all the time, talk to you every once in a while, and you could ask it to do things like.well, frankly, it wasn't that useful, but it sure was fun to hear it talk.īonziBuddy may have essentially been a worse version of Clippy, but it had one thing going for it that Clippy didn't have: It wasn't tied to office software. While Microsoft never used any of its generic characters internally, Peedy the Parrot would find a home outside the company. Microsoft also created a separate character based on the help icon to walk you through Windows XP's installation process. The Microsoft Office team decided to make their own character when they created Clippy, rather than use one of the defaults. Microsoft Agent allowed third-party developers to add their own assistants to their applications. These assistants could talk, answer voice commands, and perform actions on a user's behalf. The company even created four default characters that developers could choose from: Merlin the Wizard, Robby the Robot, Genie the Genie, and Peedy the Parrot. Agent itself was derived from code that was first introduced in Microsoft Bob (to give you an idea of how deep this bad idea rabbit hole goes). We've got dozens of fun flairs to choose from.Clippy was built on a technology called Microsoft Agent.So grab your Pogs, Surge cans and Thriller cassettes, and we'll see you in /r/nostalgia! times we shared with loved ones, both humorous and sad. Here we can take pleasure in reminiscing about the good ol' days. Whether it's an old commercial or a book from your past, it belongs in /r/nostalgia. Nostalgia is often triggered by something reminding you of a happier time.If you need to message the moderators, use the "message the moderators" button below. Many websites do not allow direct links to their images (as it leeches their bandwidth).ĭid you include the name of what you posted in the title?ĭid you wait at least 15 minutes before notifying us? Certain posts are automatically approved. Link not showing up?ĭid you use or a similar service to reupload images? Blog/Tumblr images are often marked as spam. No playlists or custom art work of any kind. This includes commentary, reviewing, reaction and ranking channels. No posts from any personal YouTube accounts or other platforms. There is no rule against reposting, but mods may tag posts as "frequent repost" or even remove it if it has just been posted.
A collection of items you have or 'found' is fine. No memes, compilations, or "starter packs". A limit of five posts per day (24 hours) is reasonable. No posts to webstores, blogs or websites with nostalgia items. You must include the name of your nostalgic item in the title. Be polite, respect each other and have fun!