Coky the Bug
Coky
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.
 

Early Coky 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.
 
Another Early Coky 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