A Brief History of BonziBuddy, the Internets Most Friendly Malware

https://www.howtogeek.com/321720/a-brief-history-of-bonzibuddy-the-internets-most-friendly-malware/



If you had a computer in the early 2000s and didn’t have a ton of common sense (or proper antivirus software), you probably ended up with an allegedly helpful purple ape named BonziBuddy crowding your desktop. He could talk, tell jokes, “sing,” and generally annoy you. He promised to help you use the internet, but mostly he just got in the way.

If you aren’t familiar with BonziBuddy, that probably sounds pretty weird to you…but the backstory behind this weird relic of the aughts is even stranger than the monkey himself.

In today’s world, virtual assistants seem normal. Alexa, Siri, Google, and even Cortana are household names, and we just sort of accepted the idea that a disembodied, vaguely human-sounding voice can help us do routine tasks. That much at least makes some sense to us now, but who in their right mind would think that you’d want a purple cartoon monkey to help you use the internet in 1999?

To answer that question, we have to go back to find another familiar face from the past: Clippy. As part of the Office 97 release, Microsoft introduced Office Assistant, an animated character that would pop up to help you do things as you worked. The default skin for Office Assistant was Clippit (commonly shortened to Clippy), a paper clip with googly eyes and a penchant for bothering you as soon as you started working on a document.

I remember BonziBuddy haha