Bonzi Buddy

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.'

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/greenmail/

>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.

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/soupy-sales-new-years-day-jo...

>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.

SOUPY SALES: Green Pieces of Paper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=a-OGy3Kh7yM&...

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.

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.

Perhaps because they find it cute, like Netbus' Whack-a-mole.

53419970 - still remember my ICQ #!

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.

Good times.