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. The other things are what you should look out for.BonziBuddy 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. Hopefully I won't get banned from Reddit :DĮdit: although, VirtualBox is legit and completely safe software. My disclaimer here is that this comment is for educational purposes, and I'm pretty sure I've given sufficient warning about the possible dangers. And, to the best of my current understanding, BonziBuddy was really just a reskin of Microsoft Agent.ĭo not install any of these on your real system, all of them will be flagged by your antivirus software, and could potentially be harmful to your system. In my journey, I've also discovered that there's an active community around an old software called Microsoft Agent, which is also no longer available from official sources, but has been rehosted here.
But still be careful :) I'd recommend using something like VirtualBox to run a virtualized operating system that's completely sandboxed from your real system, if you really want to install BonziBuddy. I happened to be doing some research on the origins of digital assistants like Cortana and Siri recently, which involved learning a bit about Bonzi, so I came across this subreddit - and thus, this thread.įor the record, I don't recommend installing anything called BonziBuddy on your real system, but the re-host that most people link to, as far as I've seen, is this one.Īgain, technically no longer spyware as the servers are now down.
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