Another rabbit hole to explore is http://thecyberbuddy.com/ which I found linked on the wiki elsewhere in the thread
Bonzi Buddy
51–60 of 120 posts
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#52Geeze, 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_.
I miss that sense of wonder from the early computing days.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#53All 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.
Well back in '95 you might have been running a 486 with a whopping 33Mhz clock speed, or a Pentium at 133Mhz if you were a baller. Your hard drive might have been over a gig, but was most likely still measured in megs. The entire system itself would most likely have 16MB of RAM, upgradable to 32MB for the power users.
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.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#54Geeze, 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_.
I miss that sense of wonder from the early computing days.
I lost at least a week when I figured out you could change the WinXP start menu text with a hex editor and went down the rabbit hole from there.
Having a start menu that read "na85" in lieu of "Start" made teenage me feel like the leetest of haxors.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#55This brings back memories. Does it still work?
It's seems to be possible according to this video.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#56Fun fact, it's named after its creators: Joe and Jay Bonzi.
But, it's basically malware.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#57Before 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.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#58I was more of an "AOLHell" and "Anarchist Cookbook" kind of kid.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#59I 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.
it was 100% malware, why are people looking back at this fondly lately?
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#60Geeze, 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_.
One great program that I recommend for Windows users looking for a plain vanilla set up is Open-Shell-Menu. https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/ It replaces the always animating Windows 10 start menu with something more simple.
are you aware that software installations and customizations take you further away from "vanilla", rather than closer to it?