Puffy

OpenBSD did not start with a fish. The first releases used a haloed BSD daemon drawn by Erick Green at Theo de Raadt's request, then a police daemon by Ty Semaka of the Calgary band the Plaid Tongued Devils, and only with 2.6 in December 1999 did the project settle on a pufferfish. The logic was twofold and slightly literal: OpenBSD leaned hard on the Blowfish cipher, and a fish that inflates into a ball of spikes is a reasonable visual argument for an operating system whose entire pitch is that it will not let you in. Puffy debuted strapped to a torpedo, periscope up, hunting the daemon whose skull is lying in the sand below him, which is about as clear a succession announcement as a mascot has ever made. Since then he has appeared on a poster, a song and a shirt every six months without fail, in guises including Puffiana Jones, Sir Puffy of Ramsay and Puff Daddy. The catch is that a different artist redraws him each release, so there is no model sheet and no canonical Puffy, just twenty five years of one project deciding again what a spiky yellow fish should look like this time.