This, in addition to being a free acquisition software, caused it to be downloaded by hundreds of people, who saw in Bonzi a kind of virtual friendship. What made him really attractive before all the people of that time was his funny “personality”, which used spontaneous and constant interaction with the user through jokes, trivia, poems and riddles. In fact, BonziBuddy was initially created by the Bonzi company over the design of Peedy the Parrot, which was released by Microsoft so that it could be intervened by third parties.īut like all his predecessors, who did not have great success in the field of technical assistance, BonziBuddy did not have it either.

When it was created, this online interactive software promised to help with all the tasks related to the internet: browse, search, e-mail, schedule and download, which at the time was a really attractive offer, as there was still a considerable number of people who did not efficiently handle all the features and tools of the internet.Īnd why not trust a computer assistant? During the nineties, several virtual assistants had already been developed to guide and solve the doubts of novice users facing the use of computers and the Internet, such as Jane 128, Microsoft Bob, the Microsoft Agent group (Peedy, Merlin, Genie, and Robby), and the Office Assistant group (Clippy, The Dot, Hoverbot, The Genius, Office Logo, Mother Nature, Scribble, Power Pup and Will). Maybe BonziBuddy never came to be really useful, but the truth is that at the beginning it was not bad either. To solve all those doubts, we invite you to read this Brief History of BonziBuddy, the Internet’s Most Friendly Malware.Īs you thought, this little friend has been revived from the past by a group of idle programmers, but his real date of birth was in 1999, when he became extremely popular among a lot of Windows users who surfed Internet, to the point of becoming “viral”, but unlike today, that term was much more literal by then.

Bonzi buddy wallpaper