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Buddy Pond Cloud Desktop

buddypond.com

56 pointspopcalc18 comments

Ha! That wizard brings back memories.

I remember in the late 90s Microsoft introducing text-to-speech recognition through those characters. I hooked that wizard up to the output from my IRC client. Anytime a message would come to the channel with my name, the wizard would speak the message. Of course, within a few minutes, the entire channel was flooded with people calling me dirty names. Good times.

Both text-to-speech and speech recognition through those characters. You could do some command-and-control through those characters.

built with web assembly. very cool

https://github.com/Marak/buddypond

Surprised to learn that AOL paid volunteer chat admin in free hours before it was $19.99 for unlimited. https://www.wired.com/1999/10/volunteers/

> Gone too were many of the volunteers. Without the hundreds of dollars worth of free hours, more than half left.

an early instance of the general rule: if you're running a social, don't piss off your already woefully underpaid mod team...

What is this? I'm not sure I understand the point.

You might not be old enough. It's a homage to one of the greatest or worst things on the internet at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#AOL_Desktop

I'm old enough, my first PC was a Tandy 386-SX33 and I found my first BBS by looking it up in the yellow pages and dialing it on a self-installed yard sale $1 2400 baud ISA modem, I'm just uncertain as to why this exists or what one would use it for.

Then again, I never installed the AOL desktop, so that might be part of my confusion, that and I don't imagine there are many other people I could use this with in my circle of weirdos.

> I'm just uncertain as to why this exists

I used it to send someone a drawing of my penis. Just like the good old days!

I didn’t recognize it either, but apparently it is because I was too old. I’d recognize the original AOL client, certainly, but AOL Desktop was apparently released in late 2007. By that time I was using cable internet, WindowMaker and KDE.

There are lots of people old enough who were simply using different providers back then. Thanksfully, AOL was not a monopoly.

This is lots of fun! Reminds me of Windows '93 [1]

[1] https://www.windows93.net/

Sweet sweet Progress Quest.

i spent a while single clicking the icons before i remembered what it was trying to emulate

Reminds me the late 90's with all the 3d DE on Linux and Windows screensaver.

Nicely executed!

(2022)

As submitted a year ago by the Author https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31182005

Reply on news.ycombinator.com