Coky the Bug
Unofficial IBI mascot, 1980-1993
- Introducing: Coky!
-
Coky the bug ... ahh let's see. Originally, the Bug was a kind of a voodoo doll made out of
an inflated black bag that Silent 700 thermal paper came in. A little face was drawn on
some masking tape, stuck on the bag. Coky's name came from the fact that I was working on a bug that happened
at Coca Cola, remotely via dial-up, for many weeks. I no longer remember the nature of that bug.
Later, a more bug-like character was developed, represented in this early picture; the
insect seems to be on a trip to the British Stock exchange. This all occurred before
September of 1980, when IBI moved from 254 W 31st street to 1250 Broadway.
Coky later evolved into a more pleasing and fewer armed insect (More Core, Please!).
The drawings presented here
are partly things I kept myself or had around on bulletin boards,
but mostly from bug documentation folders.
- The Coky Bug Folder Gallery
-
These pictures are from my stash of Coky's real habitat: bug documentation folders.
For years, while there still was an "analog" system of bug tracking,
every bug I fixed had a cartoon of Coky on its folder, either showing Coky causing the bug,
or Coky being affected by it. Sometimes, there was just some horrendous pun.
- Far Fig Newton and other pictures
-
Coky also showed up as the mascot of the fantastic Far-Fig-Newton day, which was the first
Friday (I think) after Halloween, where everyone could bring in leftover candy or candy from
their kids' stashes, or newly bought candies and cakes and spend an hour getting some
major sugar shock. Ahh, the Vax department!
Something I wish I still had - even though it would never work today - is the animated talking
HyperAnimator Coky I made that was the avatar interface to the Macintosh HLI Hypercard XCMD
suite. Hypercard let you integrate a lot of extensions, one was the HLI I wrote for it that
let you create and report off of FOCUS databases on the Mac, and this other one let you
define a bunch of images that would be synched to Macintalk, the text-to-speech program.
Typically, you'd create a query using select boxes and text boxes
(HTML terminology for Hypercard's UI), a picture of Coky would come up "Thinking" while the query
was being fetched, and then he would speak the results! I also made up a Gerry Cohen avatar.
Coky had a long life, but as the electronic code maintenance system actaully began to work,
there weren't any folders for him to be drawn on, and when I left IBI at the end of 1993,
Coky left too.
Miscellaneous pictures and documents from IBI bulletin Boards!
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Henry Lowengard,
jhhl-at-panix.com / 324 Wall St #5 / Kingston NY 12401
© 1980-2003 Henry Lowengard
Later, a more bug-like character was developed, represented in this early picture; the
insect seems to be on a trip to the British Stock exchange. This all occurred before
September of 1980, when IBI moved from 254 W 31st street to 1250 Broadway.
Coky later evolved into a more pleasing and fewer armed insect (More Core, Please!).
The drawings presented here
are partly things I kept myself or had around on bulletin boards,
but mostly from bug documentation folders.