• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      11 hours ago

      Yeah! It was a bunch of different gifs! Maybe … 128x128 px at 12 or 24 fps, something like that?

      He’d make ‘facial expressions’, and move around… looked kinda like Veggie Tales style animation.

      And there was more than just Clippy, he was just the default. There was like… an Einstein look a like… a dog… I think there were at least 8 different little mascot type things, to go along with the actual ‘speech bubble’ style, actual user interface.

      I remember just fucking around with this shit in the early 00s, in the computer lab.

      EDIT

      Ok, here’s the Office 97 version:

      https://youtube.com/watch?v=-QBlKo6o4Ec

      By the time I was using Office, a few years later, they’d figured out how to hide the ‘window’ that Clippy appears in, and basically alpha mask the gifs, make the backgrounds of them transparent.

      So, not a true ‘desktop buddy’, as you had to have Word open, but … yeah Clippy basically ‘lived in’ Word, if that makes any sense.