I’ve recently started working in the refurbishing division of an e-waste recycling company. As such, I’ve come across some retro items; items that would be useful for Twentieth Century. It now has a gigabit Ethernet card, a USB 2.0 card, more RAM (now 384 MB), and a Gravis GamePad Pro.

Louis Rossmann is a crusader for the right-to-repair movement. As part of his advocacy, he recently pleaded for people to change their online avatars to Clippy, a character that old versions of Microsoft Office featured. He praised how Clippy stood against all the anti-customer practices that companies pull today. By changing your avatar, it will catch people’s attention on the issue. I have done so. When I saw several keys of Office 2000 at work destined for the shredder, I knew what needed to be done.

• Clippy won’t scan your document to sell you ads, or even show you ads (because you supposedly bought a copy of Office). He certainly won't steal your stuff to train an AI.
• Clippy can’t be hacked for your password or personal information (because he never collected it).
• Clippy won’t save to OneDrive.
• Clippy won’t ask you to upgrade your subscription, or try to upsell you on another component or version of Office.
• Clippy doesn’t have a newsletter, Patreon, or Only Fans to nag you about.
• Clippy doesn’t have your payment information.
• Clippy won’t delete something you bought or de-list anything because some company’s distribution rights expired.
• Clippy won’t shut down because Microsoft declared bankruptcy and closed.
• Clippy didn’t tell Microsoft how often he visited you.
• Clippy isn’t driven by a capricious algorithm with suspicious motives that downranks you. He will show you irrelevant information, but that’s because he doesn’t know better.
• Clippy won’t shadowban you because you typed naughy words.
• Clippy won’t set up a paywall to read someone else’s document.
• Clippy won’t lock down your computer, and forbid you from installing any program you want.
• Clippy is incapable of hating you: he won’t enforce terms and conditions then disable your account.
• Clippy isn’t woke.

As soon as I fired up Twentieth Century, installed Office 2000, and opened Word, there he was. Armed with this retro PC, I can finally roleplay a cubicle monkey during the dotcom crash.

I also saved some keys of Office 2007 for my main desktop rig. Running on Linux and Wine, I didn’t think I could install, launch Word, and even activate it, but it worked.