Neko: History of a Software Pet Neko is a cat that runs around on the screen, chasing the mouse cursor. It has led many lives through the history of computers. The original software based on this concept was written in the 1980's by Naoshi Watanabe (若田部 直). It was called NEKO.COM and ran on the Japanese computer NEC PC-9801 in the MS-DOS command line. The next version ran on the Macintosh computer