Anyone who watched a Flash animation in the early aughts knows how much fun you can have with an early speech synthesizer you control.īonzi Software, the company behind your buddy, faced a few separate legal issues in the time from 1999 to 2004, when BonziBuddy was finally discontinued. You could also make Bonzi say whatever you wanted with it’s text-to-speech feature. Bonzi would occasionally speak up to share a lame joke or sing a song in a nauseatingly robotic voice, but he talked funny. 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. There was a lot more satisfaction in helping people administer their sensibly designed OS than in continually having to remediate their Windows systems where every user was an administrator and it was so easy for them to install malware.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. Soon after this, I started to install GNU/Linux distros on the computers of friends and family to avoid the problem altogether. Still, it was like playing whack-a-mole if there were multiple different malicious programs installed on the system and I recall that removing some malware required rebooting into safe mode before attempting to remove it. When you learned the tricks the malware-writers used, you could remove their crap quickly enough.

I ran Mandriva at home but I became quite familiar with the Windows registry after lots of time spent removing various toolbars/spyware. I used to work in an Internet café in the early-mid 2000s and the first time came across BonziBuddy, it was a very frustrating and time-consuming task to remove it (and similar malware) from a Windows OS.

Bonzi buddy without virus