Does anyone remember the sheep and orange?

September 24, 2019 11:52 AM

Long ago, when the internet was barely even a thing and I had a student office job, you could download (I assume) a...a program which made a little sheep or a little anthropomorphic orange walk about along the tops of your browser windows, fall to the bottom of the screen and bounce cutely, etc. Does anyone remember this? What was it?

And does it still exist? To this day I yearn for my little sheep and orange.

(This was on a PC.)

posted by Frowner to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Probably this guy.

See also here, a 2011 reddit thread that claims to have a link to a working copy of sheep.exe, no idea if it would run as-is on any current OS.

This site seems to be a successor/port, and indicates moving the repo to Github.

I had almost forgotten about that little guy!
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:59 AM on September 24, 2019 [6 favorites]

The sheep was esheep.exe. I can't vouch for any of the sites where it seems to still be available.

I'm not familiar with the orange, but they seem to be featured together in this ESheep and Orange YouTube video.

There's some more information on this archive of the (now deleted) Esheep Wikipedia page.
posted by ffej at 12:08 PM on September 24, 2019 [4 favorites]

I remember this!!! Didn’t have a home computer back then but did have a PC at work (but no external email—company-wide only!). I seem to remember that the sheep would sometimes “go rogue”—I think I remember the sheep sometimes setting fires.
posted by bookmammal at 12:19 PM on September 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is so old of a thing. The first sort I remember is xroach - Google Search. There are roaches on your desktop, they hide under your windows, when you close one they appear and run away to hide under another window. This sort of thing along with 'xeyes' would be simple programs to learn the basics of the windowing system of choice.

Then there's Neko (software). Where there's a cat that chases your pointer around and just crawls onto the top of a window to fall asleep when the cursor doesn't move. (Also search 'oneko')

Then there were of course the animated anime characters that would sit on top of your windows and just be cute.

I mainly wish to tell you this because of "the internet was barely even a thing" for search terms and because this sort of ha-ha goes way way back. I still have an ancient version of 'oneko' laying around in backups.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:50 PM on September 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thanks for reminding me of this!! Just found and downloaded from Microsoft app store. Looks like you can also make it several other characters, but no orange sadly.
posted by klugarsh at 5:59 PM on September 24, 2019 [4 favorites]

Thanks for this! I now have an adorable little sheep, frolicking along my tool bar. :)
posted by dancing_angel at 10:05 PM on September 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm so excited to rediscover this! I know I had Neko at one point.

And,..... I've now installed Oneko on my Pi.
posted by kathrynm at 4:55 PM on September 25, 2019 [1 favorite]