Git

At some point in the very, very early days of GitHub, Tom was looking for anything that could be anthropomorphically used as a Git totem and “Octopus” was the only term in the Git lexicon that seemed to fit the bill. Tom searched for clipart that featured an “octopus” and this Simon Oxley image was the cutest that fit the bill. So the “octocat” was born.

Fun quick read on the foundation of git and the infamous git octocat. Like a lot of great things, this was a tool for a specific problem that spawned into an entire ecosystem.