Member-only story
Who first created and drew the Golang gopher?
If you’ve used Golang or have at least heard of it, then you’ve very likely seen this little creature around:
This mascot is virtually synonymous with the actual programming language, and it’s probably the best animal mascot for something in software engineering since the Linux penguin, Tux:
The question does arise, though, where in the world did this gopher come from? Who first created it?
What if I told you that the gopher was first made for nothing to do with a statically typed, compiled programming language?
In fact, the gopher was created by artist Renee French, who actually has a Wikipedia article!
French, with her pen name Rainy Dohaney, has many published works to her name, among them H Day, The Soap Lady, The Ticking, Edison Steelhead’s Lost Portfolio: Exploratory Studies of Girls and Rabbits, and Marbles in My Underpants.
Around the turn of the 21st century, French was commissioned to design a t-shirt of all things for the WFMU radio station in New Jersey. The design she came up with has a familiar face in it:
The intersection of this random gopher drawing and computing began when Bob Flandrena of Bell Labs used the gopher as his avatar in the Bell Labs mail system.
Rob Pike, a key contributor to the Go programming language, an employee of Bell Labs on the Unix team at the time, and crucially, Renee French’s husband, then got French to design a logo for the Go project that he, Andrew Gerrand, and others were working on; this is what she came up with:
The above logo was featured on the first Go t-shirt ever made (t-shirts are a big part of this origin story) as well as the Google Code site for Go.
