Do you remember the BonziBUDDY? Here is everything you could ever possibly want to know about the notorious purple monkey spyware software from the AOL days.
Just thinking of this purple monkey now gives me goosebumps. I understand most of you may have missed him because he was not an international celebrity. Plus, he was loved and hated in equal measures. So, I will start by telling you the story of BonziBuddy.
Who was BonziBuddy?
The infamous monkey has very little history written in his honour. A sad fact, because I considered him a very good and funny buddy to me back in the days. Even Wikipedia has very little to say; maybe it’s because of the negative publicity that Bonzi got for being a malicious spyware.Well, BonziBuddy also referred to as BonziBUDDY was a freeware virtual assistant for desktop PCs back in the days. He was more or less like the annoying paperclip from Microsoft, only goofier!
Bonzi was developed by Joe and Jay Bonzi in 1999 and hence the name. Bonzi would share crack jokes, give you some facts, managed your downloads and uploads, sing songs, chat, among other features. Bonzi was designed to assist just like the Microsoft Agent used on office assistant back then.
Later on, in the year 2000, BonziBuddy was released with its character; the purple gorilla. The software used text to speech technology to communicate with users. The voice was named Sydney, which was taken from an old Microsoft Speech API 4.0. It was also referred to as Adult Male #2 in some apps.
Other software versions of Bonzi were described as spyware and adware. He was sadly discontinued in 2004 after the company that created him was faced with software litigation issues with loads of fines on their head. Bonzi’s website remained active after his exit but was later shut down towards the end of 2008.
BonziBuddy was in 2007 voted as one of the most annoying Technology Products by PC World. Simply because the poor thing kept popping up and blocking things that you wish to see. BonziBuddy was called the scourge of the internet. These accusations became so loud, that the Federal Trade Commission released a statement in 2004 saying that Bonzi Software, Inc. was ordered to pay $75,000 in legal fees, among other accusations for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act at the time.
That was a short life for my favourite internet buddy. He will forever be remembered for making me laugh back in the days. Now I know I loved him so much because I had no pressing business to do on a computer. If BonziBuddy popped on my writing screen right now, I think I will equally hate him.
My Experience with BonziBuddye
When I was a teenage, I installed BonziBuddy on any machine I could get my hands on. I loved him. He told jokes, sang songs plus he could read anything you wanted him to read in a robot voice. Kinda cool, right? No, not to everybody.To some, BonziBuddy was an irritating little monkey. Some even considered him a malware! Poor Bonzi. He didn’t get a good reception in many households. Every so often, Bonzi would ask for some tuition fees to go to virtual Jungle School to learn new jokes and songs. This is where the problem started because I could not ask my parents for real money to pay for virtual tuition for a virtual Buddy who is considered a pain in the ass by my parents. J
My mom despised BonziBuddy from the first time I installed him on our PC. Bonzi would just pop up and try to sing to her when she is checking her job emails on Outlook. Honestly, this can be very irritating if I look back from an adult’s perspective.
It eventually turned out that BonziBuddy was a malware and was accused of selling browsing details to dubious companies. Sadly, he was found and euthanized. I remember I still loved him even with the accusations of being a malware. If I were a good programmer, I would somehow revive him, of course, without the malware bit. I hope someone will find it necessary to revive him one of these fine days.
Here is a summary of what BonziBuddy could do for you:
How to describe BonziBuddy to Kids today?
Well, BonziBuddy was like Siri only that he was a funnier version of Siri. And you could not talk directly to him; you could only type your queries and wait for his response. I know this may sound old school to the kids of IPad today, but back in the days, it was a genius invention.
It was rumoured that Microsoft threatened legal actions against Bonzi Inc. But this could not be confirmed since nothing about the litigation was made public at the time.
Looking back, none of the features of BonziBuddy was impressive, if you consider the state of technology at the time. Nonetheless, it was just hard not to be fascinated by the little app if you were in junior school around that time. I mean it was free after all.
Well, the app had its fair share of irritation. For starters, it could come on top of your windows and hamper your browsing, popping things up and filling your screen with all sorts of advertisement and misleading scareware adverts. It launched stuff like BonziWorld, which was a jungle-themed central hub that redirected you to Bonzi software pages.
The Way Back Machine
Thanks to our online memory box, the Wayback machine saved these pages for you to see exactly what we saw back in the 2000s when you landed on the Bonzi site. Here are the archived pages of the website. Unless you lived it, you might not be able to fully comprehend how cool the BonziBuddy was. You can also check www.bonzi.link or www.BonziBuddy.org and get the look and feel of the old BonziBuddy.
You can even download and try out the experience of having a BonziBuddy. You will require:
- At least 16MB of RAM and 11MB of Free Space (Typical minimum Specifications for old PCs back in the ‘90s)
- Windows 9x, NT 4, ME, Win 2000 (This means you need to install an old version of windows on a virtual machine to see the BonziBuddy in action).
- You need a sound card – comes standard with most machines now.
- You need Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 or later. Now called edge.
Honestly, I didn’t figure I would have a lot to write about BonziBuddy, but here you are. Now you are on the know. Would you wish he came back? Me, yes! He should be attached to WhatsApp so that we can talk to him when you are bored of talking to real human beings!
Malware or not, the little gorilla made our days back then when using a computer was an elite’s activity.
