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.
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.
