Don Marquis (1878-1937), a newspaper columnist, created archy, a cockroach who wrote verse and philosophy by diving from the top of a manual typewriter headfirst onto its keys. archy wrote about himself and some of the characters who prowled around Marquis’ desk after hours, one of whom was a merry cat named mehitabel. Their names are spelled all lowercase because archy did all the typing, and he couldn’t manage the shift key with his headfirst technique (he also couldn’t manage apostrophes or other shifted punctuation marks).
archy was not a primary inspiration for the name of Archie, a Host Command 50 application which I wrote, but Marquis’ mehitabel is the source of this one, including the icon, which I digitized from a sketch in an Archy book. John Alcock says it looks like a ferret because of its long nose, but that’s the way the person who illustrated mehitabel drew cats.