If you ever got your hands on a computer in the late 1990s or early 2000s, chances are you’re familiar with Clippy. This anthropomorphic paper clip marked an entire generation, being one of Microsoft Word’s most famous — and hated — features. Constantly interrupting the users he claimed to be helping, this little virtual assistant had something slightly pedantic about him.
But did you know that behind this character, now legendary, hides a fascinating part of the history of modern computing? the Seattle Meta local newspaper in Washington state’s big city, investigated Clippy’s birth and death in an attempt to understand how a simple idea turned into a complete dud.
A too lustful Clippy
At the beginning of Clippy, there was Bob, a software supposed to simplify the use of Windows 95 for neophytes. Karen Fries, a Microsoft engineer, was tasked with evaluating how people who, for the most part, had never interacted with a computer behaved with software developed by the firm. Alas, the tests were rarely conclusive, the guinea pigs being mostly lost in front of the complex interfaces of the operating system. Karen Fries then had the idea of adding a little virtual owl (subsequently replaced by a dog called Rover), supposed to guide new users and replace the austere manuals provided at the time.
Bob proved to be a bitter failure and the software was scrapped even before Windows 98 was released. The idea of a virtual mascot, on the other hand, found a place of choice in the development of Microsoft Office. The Rover dog was therefore replaced by the rabbit Hopper, before the Clippy trombone imposed itself for technical reasons – an animal is more difficult to animate than a trombone. The design of the first Clippy gave rise to a lot of debate within Microsoft, in particular because its large eyes and its look had at the time a rather disturbing lustful side, according to the beta testers of the application. A problem that the tribe of male engineers had not anticipated, or even noticed…
Clippy’s Redemption
After some design revisions, the Clippy as we know it was born and accompanied the release of Microsoft Office 97, before retiring five years later, in 2003. In the meantime, the general public had started to become familiar with computer interfaces and Clippy had become useless, even painful. But if the personal assistant too quick to interrupt is today the symbol of a certain failure of Microsoft, the funny character remained. So much so that it recently made a comeback as an emoji in Microsoft’s library.
The investigation of Seattle Met well worth its quarter of an hour of reading. We learn how Clippy ended up in fanfiction erotic, what nickname – which decency prevents us from translating here – gave him Bill Gates, and how the corporate culture of Microsoft at the time gave birth to the Clippy that we tenderly love to hate.