#What pitch is bonzi buddy at how to#
#What pitch is bonzi buddy at install#
#What pitch is bonzi buddy at upgrade#
#What pitch is bonzi buddy at software#

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. 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.

#What pitch is bonzi buddy at upgrade#

TheĮntire package would cost about $150 to upgrade Bonzi He does not.Īt least not unless you order another expansion pack. 1 & 2: $10 each,Įntertainment center module to play multimedia content: “Don’t you want to send me to school, so I can learnĥ00 new jokes?” Fine, but at a cost of $19.95? Voice Just keeps on telling you to order, order, Only very limited features, such as one song or a hand The free character exists only for a limited time, a $40 valueįor free. Users thatĭownload the initial Bonzi version are lured by telling them Make him bigger, better and more interesting. Instead,īonzi is permanently trying to sell the user upgrades, that If this would only concern jokes and other fun features, itĬould be looked over (and adjusted, by the way). Additionally, the buddy talks all the time. Your screen, you are at the moment desperately trying toĬoncentrate on. That the purple guy is rather an obstacle than any help.īonzi tends to swing himself always toward that corner of Internet activities, like checking e-mail, surfing webpages,Īnd helping you find anything you want. This gorilla is supposed to do is help you with all your >Every light casts shadows and so does Bonzi, too.

#What pitch is bonzi buddy at software#

‘BonziBUDDY’ as an example of an intelligent software agent.Īlexander Löffler, University Of Applied Sciences, Zweibrücken. I wonder how much of it has to do with not being 13, and how much has to do with the modern internet. Now I sit down at my computer and check about 4 sites, have trouble focusing on making anything interesting, and generally do not have the same thrill. Every download was exciting and new, it seemed like there was a vast frontier of unexplored internet, software, IRC channels, and things I could make. Of course, there was nothing I needed on my PC at home, and nothing worth doing on it with a janky setup that only refreshed after each click, but it was fun to make. Later I used an mIRC DLL extension to control the mouse, my shitty web server, some program the took a screenshot once per second, a real web server, a dynamic DNS service, and a dial-up timed dialer to cobble together something that connected my computer to the internet during my 'computer applications' class at school and let me remote control it. I think mIRC sockets were only intended for text, or there was a distinction between text and binary variables or something. I remember it would serve a text file just fine, but images usually got corrupted.

#What pitch is bonzi buddy at how to#

I figured out how to open a socket, listen for incoming connections and just by printing out what I saw when I pointed the browser at localhost I reverse engineered HTTP and created a shitty web server in mIRC.

You could find DLLs that would extend mIRC with arbitrary functionality. It's an obscure beginning, but the first time I ever wrote something that could rightfully be considered 'code' was mIRC scripting language. I believe once or twice I even called a friend and asked them to look something up and read it to me over the phone.

#What pitch is bonzi buddy at install#

I can't even recall the number of times 13-year-old me totally screwed up trying to install Mandrake 7 or some such misadventure, and had to sweat through getting it to boot again without the aid of any other internet-connected device. This brings me back to a time when computing was fun, but also fraught with danger.