I clicked the link on my phone and it started pulling down a 50MB zip.
Not a chance it was 50MB back in the early 2000s, nobody would have downloaded it. I remember balking at installing a 13MB shareware from a magazine demo disc.
I sometimes look back in awe and wonder at how good bonzi buddy was for it's time as a _piece of software_. It was objectively ridiculous and borderline a piece of malware, but it's burned into my memory and it's functionality was fairly impressive when compared to buggy toolbar apps of today.
Microsoft Agent and Microsoft Bob and Clippy were all based on a tragic misinterpretation of the theories of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, and as much as those Microsoft products were mismanaged, mocked, maligned, and abused, his theories and work were actually quite interesting and still relevant, though tragically misunderstood. I saw him give a fascinating talk about his work at Ted Selker's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop at IBM Almaden Labs in 1996.
>The theory behind this software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
>Clifford Ivar Nass (April 3, 1958 – November 2, 2013) was a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction (HCI). He was also known for his work on individual differences associated with media multitasking. Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford and held courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Education, Law, and Sociology. He was also affiliated with the programs in Symbolic Systems and Science, Technology, and Society.
g4tv.com-video4080: Why People Yell at Their Computer Monitors and Hate Microsoft's Clippy
>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they're humans, the one thing you don't have to do is anthropomorphize them, because they're already using that part of the brain. Clippy was a program based on the research that Nass and Reeves did, and it was a tragic misinterpretation of their work."
Social science research influences computer product design
>STANFORD -- A new home computer product to be introduced with fanfare at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Saturday, Jan. 7, is based on research on human-computer interaction conducted at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
I mean, we knew it was malware and installed it anyway. I'd warn friends' parents about it and they'd shrug not really understanding why they should care.
Ironic how these days Windows itself probably contains more spyware and adware and likely exfiltrates far more data about you than Bonzi Buddy was ever able to.
>In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labelled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a toolbar, and serving advertisements.[11]
Of course, back then we called software that behaved that way malware. Today we'd call it Windows 10.
I remember about 10 years ago a college roommate and I ran `strings` on bonzi.exe and found some horrors. I think there are strings in there that specifically tell kids to go get their parent's credit cards and type in the numbers.
> Edit: Wow this got 2 downvotes in its first 2 minutes. Do you all think I'm wrong or something? The internet seems to have some references to exactly what I'm talking about. I'm quite certain I'm not wrong. Do you need proof?
Besides the general advice not to complain about downvotes, I think that you are "Do you need proof?" sounds aggrieved, even though asking for some more evidence than "I remember" and "The internet seems to have some references" is a perfectly reasonable response. At least for the current version (tested by downloading it just now), running `strings` on it produces nothing obviously nefarious at a glance (for example, no occurrences of the word "credit", or even "parent").
I certainly didn't mean to be complaining. I'm more just confused and trying to improve. I thought little stories of using linux/unix tools to peek inside early internet spyware was a guaranteed point of interest on HN, especially when other users are sharing similar stories. I was concerned that maybe I was wrong and my memory is wrong, but it's difficult to prove. If I'm sharing false information it would be nice to be corrected. But nevermind.
I posted a link above to a paper that quoted some of the things that Bonzai Buddy said, and they were pretty creepy and pushy, but it didn't mention that he asked for credit card numbers or green pieces of paper, like Soupy Sales did.
>This guy just keeps on telling you to order, order, order. “Don’t you want to send me to school, so I can learn 500 new jokes?” Fine, but at a cost of $19.95??? Voice recognition module: $15, 250 facts vol. 1 & 2: $10 each, entertainment center module to play multimedia content: $30, ... Bonzi is also supposed to tell stories. He does not. At least not unless you order another expansion pack. The entire package would cost about $150 to upgrade Bonzi totally. So much for Bonzi being freeware ...
It was adware not creepware. I haven't used thr term adware in years. Those were the days. Now we install chrome instead and mobile apps to track location, call logs, contacts and personal photos.
Sounds like a rehash of Soupy Sales' "Green Pieces of Paper" scandal.
Soupy Sales’ ‘Green Pieces of Paper’ Scandal.
Scandal erupted when children's TV host Soupy Sales asked his young viewers to send him 'little green pieces of paper.'
>In January 1965 on his morning children’s show, the performer Soupy Sales suggested to his young viewers that they find the wallets of their sleeping fathers and take out “some of those funny green pieces of paper with all those nice pictures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Hamilton, and send them along to your old pal, Soupy, care of WNEW, New York.”
>“Hey kids, last night was New Year’s Eve, and your mother and dad were out having a great time. They are probably still sleeping and what I want you to do is tiptoe in their bedroom and go in your mom’s pocketbook and your dad’s pants, which are probably on the floor. You’ll see a lot of green pieces of paper with pictures of guys in beards. Put them in an envelope and send them to me at Soupy Sales, Channel 5, New York, New York. And you know what I’m going to send you? A post card from Puerto Rico!”
>The most famous single gag comes on New Year’s Day 1965. Mr. Sales tells kids to go into their parents’ wallets and to send him “those little green pieces of paper.”It’s become a cult thing to say you sent $10, $20, he says, but if that had been true, he would have had enough money to buy the building. He received only a few dollars, and a week’s suspension.
>Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 1993, the comedian claimed he received only $1 and some Monopoly money. But that same year, he told an audience at the Brokerage Comedy Club in Bellmore, N.Y., that he received $80,000. One woman in attendance shouted, "I want my dollar back!" To which Sales responded, "That's my ride home." He also recalled a 28-year-old woman who sent in a dollar with the message, "I've seen your show, and you should go to Puerto Rico."
>You can watch the 1993 comment from the comedy club below.
Oh crap I’d forgotten about that. First experience with this was my mother calling out of the blue. “There’s this purple monkey on the screen and he’s telling me things”. For a few minutes I thought she’d OD’ed her meds.
Then there was removing that, some other more persistent malware from my father-in-law’s windows ME computer one fine Christmas Day.
All this, and only 16MB of RAM and 11MB of disk space required! I'm sure today this would be an Electron app that used at least an order of magnitude more resources. We certainly live in interesting times.
My first Windows system was a Win 95 Pentium 75 with 8 megabytes of memory. Can't remember how big the hard drive was. At the time - coming from an Amiga with 1 megabyte - 8 megabytes seemed like an obcene amount of memory but due to the demands of that OS I pretty much instantly upgraded to 16.
Well of course, my dude. The target resolution alone went from 640x480 to 4K. That's almost 30x the image data. You'd probably pack in every resolution in between, too.
Geeze, that's a blast from the past. You know it's funny- I used to periodically go looking for things to customize my desktop experience. This, those little dogs and cats, Rainmeter, Amiga workbench hacks, etc. etc. Nowadays- I supposed finally burned by enough malware and having become curmudgeonly- I want the most minimal "plain vanilla" setup I can get and pride myself in hardly ever installing _anything_.
it has little to do with age, to me, though it is far more common in older people: you value your time, and spending ages customizing everything does not help you reach your goals, so you just don't do it.
is there a need for that? I get having a mechanical keyboard hobby, that makes sense, and I don't get that there is a need to customize your stuff for customization's sake only.
there's a lot I don't understand about people, though, so this isn't some profound comment or anything.
What does Rainmeter has to do with any of the other examples? It is still a very popular framework, and the only good solution on displaying external data on windows desktop (which, I think still a better place for home user dashboarding than some browser tab)
Same, and I follow this so dogmatically that it actually pisses me off when software I use changes the defaults drastically, _even though the options to customize the behavior are stil there_.
About 10 years ago, I took a background with 2 cats and pinned window-decoration-less xeyes to them. It was hilarious when I paired with people and they would realize the cats were watching us.
Even at the time, most folks had forgotten or never knew about xeyes.
I did use to customize everything in the late 90s/early 2000s. I loved Sawmill/Sawfish for its lispy extensibility. I was constantly flipping between heavy desktop environments and seeing how stripped down I could run.
Nowadays I don't even change the wallpaper on my mac. I don't use any fancy shell prompt (just host$).
I do still have a ~200 line shell rc just to make all my oses consistent (macos, freebsd, redhat, debian/ubuntu) and deal with junk like my ssh-agent. I change a line or two every year or so. And my neovim config is in flux. But most everything else I use is just OOB.
I should say I did fall in love with chezmoi for managing config like this a couple years back and still use it religiously.
press and release windows key, type the name of the application you want, press enter.
same as windows 7.
why would I need a different shell? last time I tried one, almost 20 years ago, it crashed continually and was therefore completely useless. same with all of the stardock software I bought. garbage, all of it.
Except that if it doesn’t find thr application it will search Bing if you aren’t using Windows 10 Enterprise. This can’t be turned off unless you edit the registry. I was furious when I figured this out.
Years ago I found a great Chrome/FF extension called "Bing2Google" where any search from the start menu that gets sent to either browser is automatically re-directed to Google instead. I was more furious when they changed that to always open Edge instead of your preferred browser.
I love how an application which modifies the UI of windows does not have a single screenshot showing the application on their website. What is going on with this trend?
I have a vague memory of being able to change the windows 98 startup screen image ( where it says windows 98 ). I changed a bunch of HS computers to say nindows 88 by "photoshoping" it in ms paint.
Ah, the security of Windows 98 on common-use school computers.
I think we all had some kind of a username and password with which we were supposed to log in. Except that, of course, in Win 9x it's really only a login to the network (for whatever it was used for -- access to file shares or something?), and to access just about whatever in the OS you can just hit "cancel" and be in.
That made me think back to running litestep as an alternative shell on my Windows98 computer and occasionally having to pull the drive and mount it in another system to recover it when I blew it up with a bad configuration.
I kind of - and I am not being sarcastic - miss running every antivirus on earth as well. Finding and using software was such a thrill back then. The antivirus programs were important incantations against the evils that permeated the internet. It’s since lost that magic for me.
I know it's silly but I actually have some pretty fond childhood memories of Bonzi Buddy. Me and my cousin installed it on the family computer (running Windows ME at the time!) and would use the text-to-speech feature to make it say crazy, usually profanity-laden, things. In retrospect it was obvious adware / malware but not as bad as some of the other junk that would end up on your PC back in those days. The litany of Internet Explorer toolbars that would hijack your start page and embed HTML on any page you viewed comes to mind.
Some other nostalgic software experiences from this era: chatting with friends and customizing your away message / profile on AIM and ICQ, downloading unreleased System of a Down songs from KaZaA, playing Ultima Online until the sun came up, Flash games and animations on Newgrounds and the overall vibe of the Internet at the time - message boards, 1337speak, animated GIFs and embedded MIDI everywhere. I miss it and don't at the same time.
Yeah, I do recall playing around with that at one point! I remember it saying something like, "I'll remember you said that once robots have taken over the world" if you ever insulted it. Actually kind of eerie in retrospect.
AIM statuses were the method of ephermeral self expression back then. Installing bootleg versions of VBB, UBB, and feeling like an absolute boss when people signed up. Warez forums, EFnet, skinning winamp, downloading 50 rar files and waiting in anticipation for that file.
Ah yes, the memories. Worth looking into as well is a piece of software called Ultrahal, almost like spiritual successor in a sense but far more complex, user-editing and even a GPT-3 integration in the latest release.
Man, I remember the fight my parents and I had when I installed CometCursor on their computer and as a result inadvertently installed a bunch of crapware and malware on there. I was going to install BonziBuddy but they fortunately stopped me before I got that far.
Brings back so many fond memories. I was 5 when my family computer had Bonzi Buddy, and we loved it. We installed it every time we had to have our Windows drive reformatted (it happened quite frequently, as you can guess from our fondness for installing malware).
But hey, it used to sing songs and dance and stuff, and my mom could make it tell me to brush my teeth.
Was this related to a malware called "Gator"? I remember not being able to get rid of some combination of Bonzi Buddy and Gator from a machine. I formatted the hard drive and it still didn't get rid of the problem. Still have no idea how they did it.
Before I clicked the link I knew it was going to be a purple monkey, and I resent my brain for retaining those neurons vs any of the countless useful things I’ve forgotten since the time when this software existed.
This little fella is the avatar of the GitHub bot at our startup. I’ve got fond memories of Bonzi Buddy – he was certainly my favorite malware. That was a fun era of computing in general, and not just because it covered my formative years.
Bonzi Buddy brings up some good memories. Used to work at a place that had a very dedicated QA team. They were beautiful, wonderful people.
Our software ran almost entirely in schools. And schools were hit or miss with IT. Some had great setups. Some were entirely dependent on the teachers for the class. The latter tended to have a fair bit of malware / adware.
So QA and Tech Support set up a couple of boxes in our office that were the sacrificial goats. Connected to the internet outside of our firewall, and disconnected from our LAN. Deliberately infected with everything a curious kid might install. Testing to see how well our software would run in such an environment. And it made a nice reference for our tech support team, who often ended up providing general support for the more tech-clueless teachers.
Bonzi Buddy was one of the things installed. I was pretty excited to try him out. Was a great disappointment when he didn't do much of anything at all. But the infected boxes were kinda fun. The game of "how many toolbars can you squeeze into a browser" was more entertaining than it would seem.
119 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadNot a chance it was 50MB back in the early 2000s, nobody would have downloaded it. I remember balking at installing a 13MB shareware from a magazine demo disc.
https://youtu.be/vzbhb__khDE
I think Bonzi Buddy was built on Microsoft Agent, so it would make sense.
I propose that the saying "there's an app for that" becomes deprecated in favour of the more comprehensive "there's a wiki for that"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
>The theory behind this software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Nass
>Clifford Ivar Nass (April 3, 1958 – November 2, 2013) was a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction (HCI). He was also known for his work on individual differences associated with media multitasking. Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford and held courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Education, Law, and Sociology. He was also affiliated with the programs in Symbolic Systems and Science, Technology, and Society.
g4tv.com-video4080: Why People Yell at Their Computer Monitors and Hate Microsoft's Clippy
https://archive.org/details/g4tv.com-video4080
>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they're humans, the one thing you don't have to do is anthropomorphize them, because they're already using that part of the brain. Clippy was a program based on the research that Nass and Reeves did, and it was a tragic misinterpretation of their work."
Social science research influences computer product design
https://web.archive.org/web/20180313075429/https://web.stanf...
>STANFORD -- A new home computer product to be introduced with fanfare at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Saturday, Jan. 7, is based on research on human-computer interaction conducted at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
>"Microsoft&#x...
Of course, back then we called software that behaved that way malware. Today we'd call it Windows 10.
Besides the general advice not to complain about downvotes, I think that you are "Do you need proof?" sounds aggrieved, even though asking for some more evidence than "I remember" and "The internet seems to have some references" is a perfectly reasonable response. At least for the current version (tested by downloading it just now), running `strings` on it produces nothing obviously nefarious at a glance (for example, no occurrences of the word "credit", or even "parent").
I know what I saw.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy has a good summary
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27403600
https://dis.ijs.si/Mezi/pedagosko/Abonzi.pdf
>This guy just keeps on telling you to order, order, order. “Don’t you want to send me to school, so I can learn 500 new jokes?” Fine, but at a cost of $19.95??? Voice recognition module: $15, 250 facts vol. 1 & 2: $10 each, entertainment center module to play multimedia content: $30, ... Bonzi is also supposed to tell stories. He does not. At least not unless you order another expansion pack. The entire package would cost about $150 to upgrade Bonzi totally. So much for Bonzi being freeware ...
Soupy Sales’ ‘Green Pieces of Paper’ Scandal. Scandal erupted when children's TV host Soupy Sales asked his young viewers to send him 'little green pieces of paper.'
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/greenmail/
>In January 1965 on his morning children’s show, the performer Soupy Sales suggested to his young viewers that they find the wallets of their sleeping fathers and take out “some of those funny green pieces of paper with all those nice pictures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Hamilton, and send them along to your old pal, Soupy, care of WNEW, New York.”
>“Hey kids, last night was New Year’s Eve, and your mother and dad were out having a great time. They are probably still sleeping and what I want you to do is tiptoe in their bedroom and go in your mom’s pocketbook and your dad’s pants, which are probably on the floor. You’ll see a lot of green pieces of paper with pictures of guys in beards. Put them in an envelope and send them to me at Soupy Sales, Channel 5, New York, New York. And you know what I’m going to send you? A post card from Puerto Rico!”
>The most famous single gag comes on New Year’s Day 1965. Mr. Sales tells kids to go into their parents’ wallets and to send him “those little green pieces of paper.”It’s become a cult thing to say you sent $10, $20, he says, but if that had been true, he would have had enough money to buy the building. He received only a few dollars, and a week’s suspension.
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/soupy-sales-new-years-day-jo...
>Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 1993, the comedian claimed he received only $1 and some Monopoly money. But that same year, he told an audience at the Brokerage Comedy Club in Bellmore, N.Y., that he received $80,000. One woman in attendance shouted, "I want my dollar back!" To which Sales responded, "That's my ride home." He also recalled a 28-year-old woman who sent in a dollar with the message, "I've seen your show, and you should go to Puerto Rico."
>You can watch the 1993 comment from the comedy club below.
SOUPY SALES: Green Pieces of Paper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=a-OGy3Kh7yM&...
Then there was removing that, some other more persistent malware from my father-in-law’s windows ME computer one fine Christmas Day.
Joy to family tech support.
Your hard drive might have been over a gig, but was most likely still measured in megs.
The entire system itself would most likely have 16MB of RAM, upgradable to 32MB for the power users.
I either have a terminal window full screen or a browser
I think "Desktop Customization" were for the times we had to kill before the internet got so commonplace.
there's a lot I don't understand about people, though, so this isn't some profound comment or anything.
Even at the time, most folks had forgotten or never knew about xeyes.
I did use to customize everything in the late 90s/early 2000s. I loved Sawmill/Sawfish for its lispy extensibility. I was constantly flipping between heavy desktop environments and seeing how stripped down I could run.
Nowadays I don't even change the wallpaper on my mac. I don't use any fancy shell prompt (just host$).
I do still have a ~200 line shell rc just to make all my oses consistent (macos, freebsd, redhat, debian/ubuntu) and deal with junk like my ssh-agent. I change a line or two every year or so. And my neovim config is in flux. But most everything else I use is just OOB.
I should say I did fall in love with chezmoi for managing config like this a couple years back and still use it religiously.
https://github.com/interkosmos/xroach
It replaces the always animating Windows 10 start menu with something more simple.
press and release windows key, type the name of the application you want, press enter.
same as windows 7.
why would I need a different shell? last time I tried one, almost 20 years ago, it crashed continually and was therefore completely useless. same with all of the stardock software I bought. garbage, all of it.
Having a start menu that read "na85" in lieu of "Start" made teenage me feel like the leetest of haxors.
I think we all had some kind of a username and password with which we were supposed to log in. Except that, of course, in Win 9x it's really only a login to the network (for whatever it was used for -- access to file shares or something?), and to access just about whatever in the OS you can just hit "cancel" and be in.
Some other nostalgic software experiences from this era: chatting with friends and customizing your away message / profile on AIM and ICQ, downloading unreleased System of a Down songs from KaZaA, playing Ultima Online until the sun came up, Flash games and animations on Newgrounds and the overall vibe of the Internet at the time - message boards, 1337speak, animated GIFs and embedded MIDI everywhere. I miss it and don't at the same time.
AIM statuses were the method of ephermeral self expression back then. Installing bootleg versions of VBB, UBB, and feeling like an absolute boss when people signed up. Warez forums, EFnet, skinning winamp, downloading 50 rar files and waiting in anticipation for that file.
Good times.
But hey, it used to sing songs and dance and stuff, and my mom could make it tell me to brush my teeth.
But, it's basically malware.
Our software ran almost entirely in schools. And schools were hit or miss with IT. Some had great setups. Some were entirely dependent on the teachers for the class. The latter tended to have a fair bit of malware / adware.
So QA and Tech Support set up a couple of boxes in our office that were the sacrificial goats. Connected to the internet outside of our firewall, and disconnected from our LAN. Deliberately infected with everything a curious kid might install. Testing to see how well our software would run in such an environment. And it made a nice reference for our tech support team, who often ended up providing general support for the more tech-clueless teachers.
Bonzi Buddy was one of the things installed. I was pretty excited to try him out. Was a great disappointment when he didn't do much of anything at all. But the infected boxes were kinda fun. The game of "how many toolbars can you squeeze into a browser" was more entertaining than it would seem.