3 ms·
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Sounds like a return to
by pwg 11mo ago
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.
Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
- mschuster91 11mo agoClippy at least was funny, not creepy. And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.
- jerf 11mo agoThe Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.) That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.
- mschuster91 11mo agoDamn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was exactly what I used! ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.