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Clippy, Microsoft's Talking Paperclip, Is Back

Microsoft Clippy
Microsoft Clippy

Microsoft

Microsoft's animated paper clip named Clippy has been revived, thanks to the crazy sense of humor of the folks at startup Smore.

We discovered the Clippy.js project, through a Google+ post by Linux creator Linus Torvalds in which he jokes:

I missed Clippy (for rather obvious reasons), and never understood the hatred some people had for him (her? I'm not very good at sexing paperclips). In fact, I remember installing "Vigor" just because having a talking paperclip was clearly what the whole point of computers was, and I was very disappointed in how inferior the Linux version of clippy was.

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My life has not been complete.

Until now. Because I just found out that there's a JS version of clippy. Why is this not part of Gnome, pray tell?

To explain: Once upon a time, Microsoft created a talking paperclip with googly eyes called Clippy. It was supposed to help you do things with Microsoft Office and was included in Office versions 97 to 2003.

But mostly, Clippy was like having a really annoying, distracting office partner that never let you get anything done. Clippy was constantly fidgeting around on the screen.

The Smore team explained why they spent their weekend bringing on this project:

"Add Clippy or his friends to any website for instant nostalgia. Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two."



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