JUST SO YOU KNOW LITERALLY NONE OF THIS IS REAL

Some of it is built around real events (like the boycotting of AOL and the removal of MS Office Assistant / Clippy) but other than that it's entirely fake and just for fun.

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ExoNet ISP (ENI for short) is an ISP, or Internet Service Provider, that released in 1991. It was very similar to AOL (America OnLine) but with less advertisements for itself and more user control. Many people leaving AOL started using ENI instead as a similar but more usable alternative. It was a bit slower, but it got the job done better in many people's eyes. Unfortunately, in late-1999, a period sometimes called "Windos-ification" began, where ENI started introducing more features that essentially turned it into a browser, and it became stricter and more difficult to use until it lost almost its entire main demographic to Windows. It was already relatively small, so this put a major dent in the company. It finally declared bankruptcy in 2006, when its userbase was only 3.25% of what it had been during its most popular point.

Teero (colloquially known as "the ENI guy," "the ENI thing," or sometimes "the ENI spaceman,") was created in 1992 to promote ExoNet ISP. It would appear in many advertisements and many of the products, often in a small, generic looking UFO. It was sometimes depicted delivering a paper airplane (a symbol for a message being sent) to someone's computer. Later, in September 5th of 2002, during the "Windows-ification" of ENI, a feature was added that made an office assistant similar to Clippy (of which was retired the year before) which used Teero for its visuals. Instead of being limited to Notepad (ENI's equivelant of MS Word, not to be confused with MS Notepad) Teero was put into several of ENI's major applications, and was just as invasive as Clippy. As a joke, the devs also put in a "rage mode" which makes Teero's messages be very mean or passive aggressive, sometimes without purpose. The implementation of Teero prompted many people to stop using ENI and switch to Microsoft, but it's still iconic in many circles of the internet today.

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I'm actually probably going to use Teero in some random stuff. It's a really fun little thing yknow

I have a huge soft spot for 90s Internet stuff and the Frutiger aero aesthetic because even though I wasnt born in the right time period for that, I've grown up tinkering with an iPhone 1, an iPod, and very limited old computers. I was still exposed to stuff that was popular in like late 2015+ because I was allowed to use YouTube on our TV then, but the other stuff had a big impact on me. No wonder I'm such a nerd o(^.^ )ブ

basic character desc bc yes

btw I use "Pronoun base" instead of "Pronouns" because it's a lot easier than trying to find a way to nonexclusively list all the case declensions of pronoun in English ┑(￣Д ￣)┍

Name: Teero

Pronoun base: It

Species: Software application :P

Age: 23, as of 2025

Personality: Officially, its personality is just that it's irritable but just wants to help. Unofficially, it's a guy his job and gets really impatient because of it, but it's really cool and nice otherwise. Of course, it doesn't actually have a personality since it's not sentient.

Lore: See above. Also, a lot of people on the internet like to imagine that ENI has traumatized it.

yayayayaya so fun

happy pixelling ヽ(0 ω0 〃)ゝ