Years later, I was surprised to see the exact same cat on a "port" to the Sega Dreamcast VMU (a memory card that can function as a stand-alone device, with a 48x32 pixel screen,) where pressing a button would play one of the animations. It makes a little more sense now, finding out that the cat images were released into the public domain.

> It has led many lives through the history of computers.

> Neko on PC-9801 The original software based on this concept was written in the 1980's by Naoshi Watanabe (若田部 直). It was called NEKO.COM and ran on the Japanese computer NEC PC-9801 in the MS-DOS command line.

Also worth mentioning that the Japanese word “neko” literally is their word for “cat”.

Article neglects to notice/mention the pun; It's simultaneously “Neko DA” as in desk accessory† and “nekoだ” as in ‘to be’‡, like “it's a cat” lol

† a specific type of application that could run alongside ‘real’ applications before the Mac had any multitasking: https://spinsidemacintosh.neocities.org/im202#im018

‡ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%A0#Verb

Webneko – a desktop screenmate ported to web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40843966 - July 2024 (7 comments)

Neko: A history of a software pet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32037254 - July 2022 (6 comments)

[1] https://github.com/DISTRHO/Nekobi