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Clippy 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.



The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: 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.


Damn 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.




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