Geeze, that's a blast from the past. You know it's funny- I used to periodically go looking for things to customize my desktop experience. This, those little dogs and cats, Rainmeter, Amiga workbench hacks, etc. etc. Nowadays- I supposed finally burned by enough malware and having become curmudgeonly- I want the most minimal "plain vanilla" setup I can get and pride myself in hardly ever installing _anything_.
That made me think back to running litestep as an alternative shell on my Windows98 computer and occasionally having to pull the drive and mount it in another system to recover it when I blew it up with a bad configuration.
I have a vague memory of being able to change the windows 98 startup screen image ( where it says windows 98 ). I changed a bunch of HS computers to say nindows 88 by "photoshoping" it in ms paint.
Ah, the security of Windows 98 on common-use school computers.
I think we all had some kind of a username and password with which we were supposed to log in. Except that, of course, in Win 9x it's really only a login to the network (for whatever it was used for -- access to file shares or something?), and to access just about whatever in the OS you can just hit "cancel" and be in.
I kind of - and I am not being sarcastic - miss running every antivirus on earth as well. Finding and using software was such a thrill back then. The antivirus programs were important incantations against the evils that permeated the internet. It’s since lost that magic for me.
I love how an application which modifies the UI of windows does not have a single screenshot showing the application on their website. What is going on with this trend?
press and release windows key, type the name of the application you want, press enter.
same as windows 7.
why would I need a different shell? last time I tried one, almost 20 years ago, it crashed continually and was therefore completely useless. same with all of the stardock software I bought. garbage, all of it.
Except that if it doesn’t find thr application it will search Bing if you aren’t using Windows 10 Enterprise. This can’t be turned off unless you edit the registry. I was furious when I figured this out.
Years ago I found a great Chrome/FF extension called "Bing2Google" where any search from the start menu that gets sent to either browser is automatically re-directed to Google instead. I was more furious when they changed that to always open Edge instead of your preferred browser.
it has little to do with age, to me, though it is far more common in older people: you value your time, and spending ages customizing everything does not help you reach your goals, so you just don't do it.
is there a need for that? I get having a mechanical keyboard hobby, that makes sense, and I don't get that there is a need to customize your stuff for customization's sake only.
there's a lot I don't understand about people, though, so this isn't some profound comment or anything.
What does Rainmeter has to do with any of the other examples? It is still a very popular framework, and the only good solution on displaying external data on windows desktop (which, I think still a better place for home user dashboarding than some browser tab)
Same, and I follow this so dogmatically that it actually pisses me off when software I use changes the defaults drastically, _even though the options to customize the behavior are stil there_.
About 10 years ago, I took a background with 2 cats and pinned window-decoration-less xeyes to them. It was hilarious when I paired with people and they would realize the cats were watching us.
Even at the time, most folks had forgotten or never knew about xeyes.
I did use to customize everything in the late 90s/early 2000s. I loved Sawmill/Sawfish for its lispy extensibility. I was constantly flipping between heavy desktop environments and seeing how stripped down I could run.
Nowadays I don't even change the wallpaper on my mac. I don't use any fancy shell prompt (just host$).
I do still have a ~200 line shell rc just to make all my oses consistent (macos, freebsd, redhat, debian/ubuntu) and deal with junk like my ssh-agent. I change a line or two every year or so. And my neovim config is in flux. But most everything else I use is just OOB.
I should say I did fall in love with chezmoi for managing config like this a couple years back and still use it religiously.
So nostalgic. This brings me back to a time when computing was fun, but also fraught with danger. 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. 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.
It's an obscure beginning, but the first time I ever wrote something that could rightfully be considered "code" was mIRC scripting language. You could find DLLs that would extend mIRC with arbitrary functionality. 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. I remember it would serve a text file just fine, but images usually got corrupted. I think mIRC sockets were only intended for text, or there was a distinction between text and binary variables or something.
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. 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.
I miss those days. 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. 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. I wonder how much of it has to do with not being 13, and how much has to do with the modern internet.
All this, and only 16MB of RAM and 11MB of disk space required! I'm sure today this would be an Electron app that used at least an order of magnitude more resources. We certainly live in interesting times.
My first Windows system was a Win 95 Pentium 75 with 8 megabytes of memory. Can't remember how big the hard drive was. At the time - coming from an Amiga with 1 megabyte - 8 megabytes seemed like an obcene amount of memory but due to the demands of that OS I pretty much instantly upgraded to 16.
Well of course, my dude. The target resolution alone went from 640x480 to 4K. That's almost 30x the image data. You'd probably pack in every resolution in between, too.
>Every light casts shadows and so does Bonzi, too. What
this gorilla is supposed to do is help you with all your
internet activities, like checking e-mail, surfing webpages,
and helping you find anything you want. I have to say
that the purple guy is rather an obstacle than any help.
Bonzi tends to swing himself always toward that corner of
your screen, you are at the moment desperately trying to
concentrate on. Additionally, the buddy talks all the time.
If this would only concern jokes and other fun features, it
could be looked over (and adjusted, by the way). Instead,
Bonzi is permanently trying to sell the user upgrades, that
make him bigger, better and more interesting. Users that
download the initial Bonzi version are lured by telling them
the free character exists only for a limited time, a $40 value
for free. So far, so good. But this basic version includes
only very limited features, such as one song or a hand
full of jokes and amazing facts. While
the general talkativity is adjustable,
the continuous advertisements keep
on flowing out of his little mouth or
popping up in the middle of the screen.
This is extremely annoying. This guy
just keeps on telling you to order, order,
order. “Don’t you want to send me to school, so I can learn
500 new jokes?” Fine, but at a cost of $19.95??? Voice
recognition module: $15, 250 facts vol. 1 & 2: $10 each,
entertainment center module to play multimedia content:
$30, ... Bonzi is also supposed to tell stories. He does not.
At least not unless you order another expansion pack. The
entire package would cost about $150 to upgrade Bonzi
totally. So much for Bonzi being freeware ...
I sometimes look back in awe and wonder at how good bonzi buddy was for it's time as a _piece of software_. It was objectively ridiculous and borderline a piece of malware, but it's burned into my memory and it's functionality was fairly impressive when compared to buggy toolbar apps of today.
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. 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.
>The theory behind this software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
>Clifford Ivar Nass (April 3, 1958 – November 2, 2013) was a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction (HCI). He was also known for his work on individual differences associated with media multitasking. Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford and held courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Education, Law, and Sociology. He was also affiliated with the programs in Symbolic Systems and Science, Technology, and Society.
g4tv.com-video4080: Why People Yell at Their Computer Monitors and Hate Microsoft's Clippy
>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they're humans, the one thing you don't have to do is anthropomorphize them, because they're already using that part of the brain. Clippy was a program based on the research that Nass and Reeves did, and it was a tragic misinterpretation of their work."
Social science research influences computer product design
>STANFORD -- A new home computer product to be introduced with fanfare at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Saturday, Jan. 7, is based on research on human-computer interaction conducted at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
>"Microsoft's new Bob home computer program is an example of how formerly arcane knowledge about human behavior has become as relevant as computer science to the communication technology marketplace," said John Perry, director of CSLI. The 12- year-old Stanford center does research in the related fields of information, computing and cognition.
>"The interface between humans and computers is where the action in computers is now, and so research on how people think and behave is becoming hot stuff," Perry said.
>Two social scientists, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, professors in the Communication Department, provided their theories and research results to Microsoft Corp.'s "social interface" program designers. The program's first product, called Bob, is to be introduced Saturday, Jan. 7 by Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Reeves and Nass are currently serving as consultants to Microsoft.
>Their research can be applied, however, to other forms of information technology, including voicemail and interactive television.
>"Nass' and Reeves' work considers to what extent people react to technology as if it were more real than it is," Perry said. "They have found that to a very considerable extent people treat their computers and other computer-driven technology in the same ways that they treat people - as if the computer possessed reason, feelings, etc. People also treat pictures on screens as real objects, rather than as representations of real objects. This is relevant to anyone who wants to design technology or content that is as effective as it can be," Perry said.
>This work can also be controversial, Nass said. For example, some women have complained about findings, in his and Reeves' experiments with computer voices, that people are prone to gender stereotyping in voice-based technologies. "Female voices are perceived as less effective evaluators and more nurturing than are male-voiced systems. Female voiced computers are perceived as better teachers of love and relationships and worse teachers of technical subjects than are male-voiced teaching systems," the two reported in CSLI's annual research report.
>"We are not supporting gender stereotyping but we are identifying something that people designing products should be sensitive about," Nass said. "It's an important finding also, because it says that you can't blame women for gender stereotyping because of the way they dress and behave. Here is a black box that doesn't dress or behave differently than men, and it still gets gender stereotyped." [...]
Computers as Social Actors. Clifford Nass. Professor. Stanford University. "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop, IBM Almaden Labs, 1996.
>Individual's interaction with technologies is fundamentally, emphasis on fundamentally, social and natural, and in a minute I'll define what I mean by social and natural. I can refer to in questions. Second point if you'll see is these responses are automatic and unconscious. Simply put, all of you in the audience will deny that you would do when you would see people like you that is experienced computer users do up here. The reason you'll deny it is because these are responses that you're not consciously aware of and that you couldn't control. So what do I mean by fundamentally social. What I mean is go to the social science section of the library and the argument of this talk is the people who know the most by far about human computer interaction or social science. Unfortunately, none of them know that. Little did they know that they had been spending all their time writing deeply about human computer interaction and just were not aware of it. [...]
>Phil Agre: This may be as big a question as Ken's, Cliff I found your presentation ethically troubling all the way down, I want to ....
>Clifford Clifford Nass: It's not my fault (laughs in the background)
>Phil Agre: No, I think it is. At least, it's my concern. Let me just try a scenario on you. In the literature you are talking about is a great deal of research on the conditions under which people are more likely to obey instructions. What do you think about imbedding those principles in user interfaces. Are you comfortable with that?
>Clifford Nass: Okay, I think I can give you a really short answer. It is critically important and socially valuable to know all the terrible ways that people can be manipulated. That is critically important that is not to say, nor if I advocated at all in this talk, that we necessarily should use those methods. The discovery that people can be manipulated is one of the most important social findings in the 20th century and I'm also delighted we know that. I'm also delighted that we know we should avoid it, that's good too. There is no ethical component to the discovery that these things exist, there is an ethical component in using them and I am not advocating which ones you use and which ones you don't. That's for the individual ..
>Ted Selker: Except, except when you are in your consulting role.
>Clifford Nass: Well but even there, I'll give you a really short anecdote: male characters are trusted more than female characters.
>Ted Selker: So the character in us, for example if I am designing a user interface I really want to focus and work on tasks and be oriented. Now if I've got this little guy over here, that's like disorienting me. I'm sorry guys, that's not really helping with my task. Now when is it appropriate to have an avatar helping me in a task, and that has to do when the task is generally social probably plus I'm sure we can learn about that.
>Clifford Nass: No, it's the same thing as sometimes when I want to know what the meaning of a word is, I look in the dictionary. Sometimes I go to the guys next door, not for reasons of speed but I feel like being social with the guy next door. Even though I may be working on a task I may just feel like it. Similarly social things should be there, social manifestations should be there when you feel like it. With that said, one lesson from Bob is the characters there where way over the top. They spent their life saying look at me I am a character, look at me I am a character, we don't like that in people and we certainly don't like in software either. So social presences that are available when we want them and not when you don't are the people we like the best and those are the people we should model.
I mean, we knew it was malware and installed it anyway. I'd warn friends' parents about it and they'd shrug not really understanding why they should care.
Ironic how these days Windows itself probably contains more spyware and adware and likely exfiltrates far more data about you than Bonzi Buddy was ever able to.
>In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labelled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a toolbar, and serving advertisements.[11]
Of course, back then we called software that behaved that way malware. Today we'd call it Windows 10.
I know it's silly but I actually have some pretty fond childhood memories of Bonzi Buddy. Me and my cousin installed it on the family computer (running Windows ME at the time!) and would use the text-to-speech feature to make it say crazy, usually profanity-laden, things. In retrospect it was obvious adware / malware but not as bad as some of the other junk that would end up on your PC back in those days. The litany of Internet Explorer toolbars that would hijack your start page and embed HTML on any page you viewed comes to mind.
Some other nostalgic software experiences from this era: chatting with friends and customizing your away message / profile on AIM and ICQ, downloading unreleased System of a Down songs from KaZaA, playing Ultima Online until the sun came up, Flash games and animations on Newgrounds and the overall vibe of the Internet at the time - message boards, 1337speak, animated GIFs and embedded MIDI everywhere. I miss it and don't at the same time.
AIM statuses were the method of ephermeral self expression back then. Installing bootleg versions of VBB, UBB, and feeling like an absolute boss when people signed up. Warez forums, EFnet, skinning winamp, downloading 50 rar files and waiting in anticipation for that file.
Yeah, I do recall playing around with that at one point! I remember it saying something like, "I'll remember you said that once robots have taken over the world" if you ever insulted it. Actually kind of eerie in retrospect.
Oh crap I’d forgotten about that. First experience with this was my mother calling out of the blue. “There’s this purple monkey on the screen and he’s telling me things”. For a few minutes I thought she’d OD’ed her meds.
Then there was removing that, some other more persistent malware from my father-in-law’s windows ME computer one fine Christmas Day.
Bonzi Buddy brings up some good memories. Used to work at a place that had a very dedicated QA team. They were beautiful, wonderful people.
Our software ran almost entirely in schools. And schools were hit or miss with IT. Some had great setups. Some were entirely dependent on the teachers for the class. The latter tended to have a fair bit of malware / adware.
So QA and Tech Support set up a couple of boxes in our office that were the sacrificial goats. Connected to the internet outside of our firewall, and disconnected from our LAN. Deliberately infected with everything a curious kid might install. Testing to see how well our software would run in such an environment. And it made a nice reference for our tech support team, who often ended up providing general support for the more tech-clueless teachers.
Bonzi Buddy was one of the things installed. I was pretty excited to try him out. Was a great disappointment when he didn't do much of anything at all. But the infected boxes were kinda fun. The game of "how many toolbars can you squeeze into a browser" was more entertaining than it would seem.
Man, I remember the fight my parents and I had when I installed CometCursor on their computer and as a result inadvertently installed a bunch of crapware and malware on there. I was going to install BonziBuddy but they fortunately stopped me before I got that far.
Before I clicked the link I knew it was going to be a purple monkey, and I resent my brain for retaining those neurons vs any of the countless useful things I’ve forgotten since the time when this software existed.
Brings back so many fond memories. I was 5 when my family computer had Bonzi Buddy, and we loved it. We installed it every time we had to have our Windows drive reformatted (it happened quite frequently, as you can guess from our fondness for installing malware).
But hey, it used to sing songs and dance and stuff, and my mom could make it tell me to brush my teeth.
Was this related to a malware called "Gator"? I remember not being able to get rid of some combination of Bonzi Buddy and Gator from a machine. I formatted the hard drive and it still didn't get rid of the problem. Still have no idea how they did it.
This little fella is the avatar of the GitHub bot at our startup. I’ve got fond memories of Bonzi Buddy – he was certainly my favorite malware. That was a fun era of computing in general, and not just because it covered my formative years.
I remember about 10 years ago a college roommate and I ran `strings` on bonzi.exe and found some horrors. I think there are strings in there that specifically tell kids to go get their parent's credit cards and type in the numbers.
It was adware not creepware. I haven't used thr term adware in years. Those were the days. Now we install chrome instead and mobile apps to track location, call logs, contacts and personal photos.
Sounds like a rehash of Soupy Sales' "Green Pieces of Paper" scandal.
Soupy Sales’ ‘Green Pieces of Paper’ Scandal.
Scandal erupted when children's TV host Soupy Sales asked his young viewers to send him 'little green pieces of paper.'
>In January 1965 on his morning children’s show, the performer Soupy Sales suggested to his young viewers that they find the wallets of their sleeping fathers and take out “some of those funny green pieces of paper with all those nice pictures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Hamilton, and send them along to your old pal, Soupy, care of WNEW, New York.”
>“Hey kids, last night was New Year’s Eve, and your mother and dad were out having a great time. They are probably still sleeping and what I want you to do is tiptoe in their bedroom and go in your mom’s pocketbook and your dad’s pants, which are probably on the floor. You’ll see a lot of green pieces of paper with pictures of guys in beards. Put them in an envelope and send them to me at Soupy Sales, Channel 5, New York, New York. And you know what I’m going to send you? A post card from Puerto Rico!”
>The most famous single gag comes on New Year’s Day 1965. Mr. Sales tells kids to go into their parents’ wallets and to send him “those little green pieces of paper.”It’s become a cult thing to say you sent $10, $20, he says, but if that had been true, he would have had enough money to buy the building. He received only a few dollars, and a week’s suspension.
>Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 1993, the comedian claimed he received only $1 and some Monopoly money. But that same year, he told an audience at the Brokerage Comedy Club in Bellmore, N.Y., that he received $80,000. One woman in attendance shouted, "I want my dollar back!" To which Sales responded, "That's my ride home." He also recalled a 28-year-old woman who sent in a dollar with the message, "I've seen your show, and you should go to Puerto Rico."
>You can watch the 1993 comment from the comedy club below.
> Edit: Wow this got 2 downvotes in its first 2 minutes. Do you all think I'm wrong or something? The internet seems to have some references to exactly what I'm talking about. I'm quite certain I'm not wrong. Do you need proof?
Besides the general advice not to complain about downvotes, I think that you are "Do you need proof?" sounds aggrieved, even though asking for some more evidence than "I remember" and "The internet seems to have some references" is a perfectly reasonable response. At least for the current version (tested by downloading it just now), running `strings` on it produces nothing obviously nefarious at a glance (for example, no occurrences of the word "credit", or even "parent").
I certainly didn't mean to be complaining. I'm more just confused and trying to improve. I thought little stories of using linux/unix tools to peek inside early internet spyware was a guaranteed point of interest on HN, especially when other users are sharing similar stories. I was concerned that maybe I was wrong and my memory is wrong, but it's difficult to prove. If I'm sharing false information it would be nice to be corrected. But nevermind.
I posted a link above to a paper that quoted some of the things that Bonzai Buddy said, and they were pretty creepy and pushy, but it didn't mention that he asked for credit card numbers or green pieces of paper, like Soupy Sales did.
>This guy just keeps on telling you to order, order, order. “Don’t you want to send me to school, so I can learn 500 new jokes?” Fine, but at a cost of $19.95??? Voice recognition module: $15, 250 facts vol. 1 & 2: $10 each, entertainment center module to play multimedia content: $30, ... Bonzi is also supposed to tell stories. He does not. At least not unless you order another expansion pack. The entire package would cost about $150 to upgrade Bonzi totally. So much for Bonzi being freeware ...
Ah yes, the memories. Worth looking into as well is a piece of software called Ultrahal, almost like spiritual successor in a sense but far more complex, user-editing and even a GPT-3 integration in the latest release.
I clicked the link on my phone and it started pulling down a 50MB zip.
Not a chance it was 50MB back in the early 2000s, nobody would have downloaded it. I remember balking at installing a 13MB shareware from a magazine demo disc.
