[Excessive printer noise]
Turns out laser printing is quite noisy!
But I absolutely love it. Everything is printed in such crisp clarity. You can't tell one
copy from another. You can even print multiple copies of the same image, or document, so
you can pass it around to all your friends (yeah, that’s why I’ve only printed 1
copy).
But back in late 1996, Hewlett Packard were incredibly keen for you to print out multiple
copies of the same document. So much so, that they designed a fish to encourage you, and
the name of that fish was Mopy…
~Advert I'm here with some of the HP engineers, who
worked on the new laserjet. -this guy looks like he's being held hostage,
but don't worry, he's not- 5si Mopier. It prints multiple originals.
Collates. Staples. It does everything but mow the lawn.
[busy music] ~Like a belt drive would be better.
~Do we have to print whilst we're mowing?
This is an advert dreamt up by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for HP in 1996. HP had just launched
a new range of printers for the home and office, and this set of commercials tried to have
a laugh at engineers, whilst trying to make the product more endearing to the everyday
user. Home users could buy a Deskjet 693c for example, whilst a demanding business might
want the Laserjet 5si Mopier. The Mopier commercials themselves proved slightly controversial;
with the equipment cost anaylsis specialists Prosource, complaining about HP trying to
insinuate that using their Mopier to print multiple copies of a document, improves both
quality and cost efficiency, over a photocopier;
“The ad is based on imaginative assumptions and is inaccurate”
You see the idea of a Mopier printer is, you can send one print job to it over a LAN, the
printer would then store this print job on an internal hard-drive, and then could be
directed to print as many copies as you wanted, without clogging the network up by sending
the same document to print 1,000 times; which back then, would slow down not only the network,
but your computer, as well as meaning other print jobs could get caught up in a batch.
The 5Si Mopier then, was designed to remove the photocopier from the equation entirely.
This of course, was easier for the user, apparently cheaper & higher quality according to HP,
and of course meant, you were using up HP Toner cartridges quicker. So HP were keen
to encourage office workers to use this functionality as much as possible.
That’s where MopyFish comes in.
Oh look it's Tamagotchi. Her new favourite pet. So what's that make me? Fishsticks?!
-Oh are you hungreee?
Tamagotchi had also burst onto the scene in 1996, and the craze was quickly making its
way from Japan, over to the West. It was Tamaogotchi that inspired PFMagic’s Catz for example,
or 3D Pets by Parys Technografx, and even Mindscape’s Creatures. But these programs
aren’t really suitable for an office. What is suitable, of course, is a screensaver.
Previous fishtank simulating screensavers already existed, but most of these were crappy,
brainless affairs, splashed with shareware messages.
Commercial programs also existed, but these were pricey, and few and far between.
MopyFish was different; it wasn’t a mindless animation of fish swimming by, but importantly
it was also free and widely available. MopyFish was part of a carefully orchestrated viral
marketing campaign by HP that would see it appearing in magazines, on coverdisks, and
across the internet. Which of course meant that millions of PC users quickly replaced
their previous screensavers, with Mopy.
To assist in their global fish domination, HP had tasked The Global Beach Group to create
their fishy friend; established in 1993, Global Beach’s business model was based around
creating interactive multimedia programmes for corporates, such as Jaguar, Porsche and
now, in October 1997, HP.
Now corporate companies usually hire expensive consultancy companies to make their product
look as perfect as possible. But with SquareSpace, that doesn’t need to be the case.
Let’s say you run a Goldfish shop. Well, you can just find a website template that
looks the part, make a few tweaks in the WYSIWYG editor, and literally within minutes you can
start selling aquarium wares online.
With their marketing tools, you can even setup a social feed or regular newsletter for those
fishy fiends, right from the dashboard.
Click the link below to get cracking, and use the code NOSTALIGANERD for 10% off your
first site purchase or custom domain.
Ok, let’s install it and check out this little flappy fella.
I’m running it under Windows 98, and this is version 1.9, in version 1.9a, they went
for a darker theme, but in any case, the installation program is pretty painless. There we go. So
now, via the control panel we can simply select MopyFish and we’re good to go.
Mopy opens into a black void, happily swimming about.
At the top we can name our little orange friend. By clicking on the shell we can bring up a
host of options and information.
WARNING Your MOPy fish is not a toy.
It is a pet fish that has been developed to mimic the behaviour of a real Parrot Fish.
It has taken many thousands of man hours to build the artificial brain that will ensure
your fish behaves just like our two real fish (Spike & Reef) that we used to model the MOPy
fish on.
It goes on to tell us that NerdFish will remember how we treat him, and develop a unique personality,
and that we can interact by clicking, rapidly clicking or by dispensing food.
And we can. If I repeatedly click NerdFish for example, he’ll get stressed and start
flying all over the place. He then becomes very timid about eating food, or generally
interacting…. I feel a bit bad now. Poor NerdFish.
If I leave him for a bit, he’ll calm down. But if I treat him terribly for a while, he
can remember it for several days!
Clearly, then, this isn’t your typical screensaver. In fact, to exit we need to pull the plug
down the bottom right. Although, if you run this under NT, then it will force close when
you move the mouse. So you’d have to run the main program, rather than use it as a
screensaver.
It’s not great for an actual screensaver anyway, because these lines at the sides,
and clickable buttons are permanent fixtures. At least in sreensavers like Johnny Castaway,
the island would move every 5 minutes. But, by this point, CRTs had come a long way, and
weren’t likely to succumb to burnt in imagery.
But it’s looking a bit bland around here, it would be nice to have a plant, maybe an
air line. Well, that’s where points come in, and really the underlying premise for
this program.
We start with 40 points, but to get a rock and plant, we’re gonna need 800. Even more
for these other desirable items… and there are two ways of getting them.
The first is to use HP’s Mopier utility, to print Multiple Original Printouts. That’s
what MOPy stands for, by the way. Every time we print multiple original copies of a document
on our Mopier printer, we get 20 points. NICE. That means that we have to buy Toner sooner,
but on the flip side, we can get a nice Rock and Plant with just 38 prints! Wahoo! Plus
if we print in colour, we get double points!
The other way is just to wait. All of these items will appear given enough time. I didn’t
have a Mopier printer in the 90s, and I suspect most other people didn’t also. So that’s
what most of us did.
But lucky for us, Bill Greganti produced a hack called freemopy in 1998 which gives us
all the points we need at the click of a button.
Now we’re talking. We’ve got a plant, we’ve got bubbles, we’ve even got a thermometer
and the ability to increase or decrease the temperature, which could lead to the death
of NerdFish if we’re not too careful.
Oh.
It’s easy enough to reset Mopy through the Screensaver options. There you go. Right as
rain again.
**Although every time your fish dies, you also lose all your cool stuff. Let’s give
this guy a new name.
Ok, once we’ve got 3200, points, we can now get some special aphrodisiac fish food
by visiting www.hp.com/go/fish, and entering this private password! COOL!
Oh, that’s not good. Now, for whatever reason, archive.org wasn’t able to crawl that URL
back in the 90s, but in 2001, mopyfish.net appeared to replace it, but obviously we still
can’t enter that password. This is after all, just a snapshot, all the underlying code
and backend is long gone.
But, lucky for us, Bill Greganti, has us covered for that too, with the utility kissfish. Simply
run that, and there we go, now we can dispense aphrodisiac, and RichFish kisses the screen.
Lovely.
**The creation of mopyfish.net in 2001, is also the point at which version 1.9a was released,
which actually dispenses with the affiliation with Hewlett Packard. You can see on 1.9,
we get lots of text about the benefits of Mopying, etc, etc. But with 1.9a Mopy is now
his own thing, a stand alone program being pushed by Global Beach. Other than that, the
fish itself is his old emotional self.
It should be noted that, RichFish will get upset, poorly and sometimes angry, if you
don’t feed him on a regular basis. In fact, if we don’t feed him for 3 weeks. Oh.
It’s easy enough to reset Mopy through the Screensaver options. There you go. Right as
rain again.
How can you tell if a fish is angry anyway. I mean, does he look angry? He’s got about
as much range as Arnold Swarzenegger at the start of his career. I’d say he’s angry,
I mean, I’d be angry if I kept being resurrected this many times and renamed.
Of course, if you wanted, you could also just set your system date back a week, feed your
fish, and then they’ll be fine again. There’s no hidden complexity when it comes to the
passing of time with this guy.
There are also a few secret commands you can type. drinkme will make NerdTheThird twice
as large. Eatme will make him twice as small. Downsideup will invert the fella. Fishntrip
will change his colours and mdk will.
Oh.
**Oh for CHRIST’S SAKE WOULD YOU STOP DYING ALREADY.
It’s easy enough to reset Mopy through the Screensaver options. There you go. Right as
rain again.
We’ll try and treat FlapFace the Forth with a bit more kindness this time. Maybe he’ll
fare better.
It’s actually quite interesting to watch him go about his duties, and really quite
clever. The installation for MOPY fits on a single 3.5″ floppy, clocking in at just
1,335KB. But, if you extract each frame of animation from the DAT file, there’s 661
different images. Compressing this lot down into a tiny program, that acts like a fish
was pretty impressive. It’s also what made it quick to download and install.
It’s for this combination of reasons, that by the year 2000, it had been downloaded more
than 10 million times, earning the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded cyberpet..
and even apparently being Big Brother’s Virtual Pet, as seen on the TV programme Big
Brother.
It’s no wonder that it stuck in my mind so clearly, and why so many of us remember
this little fish, designed to simply make us use the printer, rather than the photocopier.
Global Beach would go on to create VirtualCreatures, which first and formost, included a pair of
tarantulas to keep you company. Although they also planned a Scorpion, Seahorse, Chameleon,
Frog, and several more.
Unfortunately, the virtual pet craze was at its height in the 90s, and so, many of these
didn’t make it to fruition.
But at least we’ve got Mopy.
Hey, FlapFace the Forth, how are you doing?
Oh.
Until next time, I’ve been Nostalgia Nerd. Toodleoo.