Here’s new suggested backgrounds for Teams, Zoom or other calls, dug out of Microsoft’s not always illustrious past. In other words, they are trying to rewrite the history of Clippy, again.
Clippy
The new Clippy image is part of Microsoft’s ongoing revisionist history. This campaign seeks to convince people that Clippy wasn’t as bad as it really was or that the problem wasn’t with Microsoft, it was customers who misunderstood. See Microsoft revises Clippy history.
Take this quote from the blog announcing these nostalgia images:
“You may think Clippy was too persistent, too eager, perhaps even too polite. We like to think that Clippy, the true OG virtual assistant, was just a bit ahead of its time. “
It was universally agreed at the time, inside and outside Microsoft, that the ‘Office Help aka Clippy’ WAS both too persistent and too eager. Few, if any, complained about politeness.
Spare us this nonsense about Clippy being ‘ahead of it’s time’. It wasn’t. The major problem with the help system was that it was very difficult to shut off. The option to not show a help item was ignored. This was a known bug during the beta testing of Office but was allowed to persist all through the public release and updates.
Windows XP wallpaper
Perhaps the best Windows wallpaper was in Windows XP.
An interesting read is the story behind the Bliss image.
Completed Solitaire
This IS fun. Finishing a game of Windows Solitaire did show a wonderful animation for the time.
The original Solitaire finish was an informal way to test the speed of the computer. The animation timing wasn’t controlled in fractions of a second just by how fast the computer could display it. As computers got faster, the animation started whizzing by.
Windows Paint
Paint is almost forgotten now there are so many other and better image tools.
Get the Nostalgia backgrounds
All these backgrounds can be downloaded directly from here. They are supposedly for the background of Teams calls, they are really a set of four .JPG images that can be used for any purpose including the background of Zoom calls.
Add your own background image to a Teams call
