Microsoft’s Clippy was one of the most hated features ever, but distance makes the heart grow fonder

MICROSOFT’S Clippy was one of the most annoying features ever, but there’s probably a lot you don’t know about the famed paperclip.

Remember Clippy? You probably either loved or hated him.

WHETHER you loved him, or you hated him, you no doubt remember Clippy.

For those born before the late 90s, the little paperclip character with his big eyeballs and incessant need to help will forever be synonymous with Microsoft Word and the early days of personal computing.

But there’s a lot you probably don’t know about the life of Clippy (because why would you?). Despite becoming an indelible feature of the early editions of Microsoft’s home office software, it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the little mascot that just wanted to help.

Clippy — who was originally named Clippit — was the onscreen assistant from Microsoft Office products in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He would appear on screen unprompted with suggestions that were supposed to be helpful. But like an annoying younger sibling who wouldn’t leave you alone when you were hanging out with your older friends, Clippy’s constant nagging and seemingly random suggestions quickly became annoying.

But that wouldn't have shocked Microsoft. In early focus group testing, the anthropomorphised paperclip wasn’t exactly a hit with the public.

A Microsoft executive at the time, Roz Ho, once said in focus group testing the results came back “kind of negative.”

In particular women didn’t like him because they thought that Clippy were leering at them. After all, who wants a creepy paperclip eyeballing you when you’re trying to write a letter. Those eyebrows said so much.

Bill Gates on stage with Clippy

The engineers basically decided to disregard the focus group feedback and shipped Clippy as he was. As a result it turned out to be one of the most unpopular features ever introduced, especially among female users.

In 2010, TIME Magazine named it as one of the 50 worst inventions of all time.

“At one point he was annoying hundreds of millions of people a day, which was kind of funny,” said Clippy illustrator Kevan Atteberry. So it’s no surprise that he became rather detested by some.

“They f***ing hate him! And you know what, that’s fine. Any press is good press. But to be honest, not everybody hates him. I get a dozen pieces of fan mail from people that just loved Clippy,” he told Motherboard earlier this year.

As the visual creator of Clippy, Mr Atteberry was originally embarrassed by being the father of the most hated paperclip in the world and didn’t include the character in his portfolio of works. That was until eventually he realised Clippy’s notoriety carried with it a certain cache for the man behind it.

Among some hardcore fans, Clippy has even become a cult favourite appearing on clothes and various memorabilia. It has even been the subject of bizarre fan art, including erotic fan fiction.

Clippy fan art has taken off, even including some erotica.

A fine read, I'm sure.

These days so many of our products are imbued with digital helpers, such as Apple’s Siri or Alexa in Amazon’s smart home speaker. But while they have the privilege of being powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to help them help us, it’s not hard to view Clippy as an early version of such systems - a clunky pioneer of digital assistants from an age when IT was much much simpler.

And, as they say, the first one through the wall always gets bloody.

Less than six years after his debut in Windows Office 1997, Clippy went into an early retirement in 2002 when he was turned off by default, meaning most users at the time probably never saw him.

When then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates announced Clippy’s retirement in 2001, saying “XP stands for Ex-Paperclip,” he got a standing ovation. Poor Clippy.

He finally departed the digital domain in 2007 when Microsoft Office dismissed him all together. Unlike when Microsoft tried to kill off its Paint program earlier this year, there was no protest or outcry over the death of Clippy.

Clippy just showed up in the press room at #MSBuild and everyone is more excited about this than anything we saw onstage pic.twitter.com/Ibgga5LXBh

— Karissa Bell (@karissabe) May 11, 2017

He may have been killed off long ago, and without much fanfare, but his memory lives on. Clippy is firmly entrenched in the pantheon of 90s nostalgia and an appearance of a Clippy mascot at Microsoft’s BUILD conference this year proved he is far from forgotten.

“He’s still part of our culture,” Mr Atteberry said. “Even though he hasn’t been an active part of our culture, even though he hasn’t been part of the software in decades.

“The fact that people despise him or hold him in disdain is probably what keeps him in the forefront of our memory.”

RIP Clippy.

Why did Clippy have to die. He was just a boy. It's not fair.

We'll never forget you Clippy pic.twitter.com/USqfYu56CD

— ~*🎃xXMiggsXx🎃*~ (@miggsboson) July 1, 2017