Coyote

The arrival of Coyote [Coyote reaches the end of the road] was at the time considered cutting edge technology for many on the World Desk - ironic in view of the way it is now contemptuously dismissed as archaic. It was so cutting edge in fact that at least one member of the desk (name withheld) was said to have resigned rather than face the trauma of using it. It also removed, sadly, the scintillating prospect of partial crucifixion on a REAL spike. I wonder whether the young-uns ever really know what a spike button represents in modern systems. Coyote was also remarkable for being totally non intuitive so many capabilities remained known to only a few. It seems as if journalistic use went from about 20 per cent of what was possible to 70 per cent among the more technically adept, or rather those who had learned the secret code from their colleagues. I sometime imagined there was some Joda-like hairy person living in a cave in the Californian mountains who was the only one to know everything about how it worked.

Hats off to Peter Mosley and the late Alan Biggs who faced the huge challenge of persuading resistant journalists to use it. It is also worth mentioning that while Coyote was good for desks it was terrible for remote filing since it needed a pretty stable signal to remain functioning and avoid the dreaded frozen and completely lost story. So perhaps we should issue additional plaudits to Ivan Rudnev for the excellent and much more flexible Hermes system which overcame many of these limitations. Let’s not forget either that Coyote, for all its limitations, outlived two other disastrous attempted substitutes, Typlan and News2Web. The screw-ups in introducing those systems not only confirm that we owe thanks to Peter and Alan, but had a major influence in making sure sufficient resources were devoted to development of Lynx – many of whose features are modern updates of elements of Coyote. ■