Fog Creek Copilot is a remote assistance service offered by Fog Creek Software. It launched on August 8, 2005.[1]
Originally known as Project Aardvark, Fog Creek Copilot was developed by a group of summer interns at Fog Creek Software. Fog Creek's founder, Joel Spolsky, wanted to give his interns the experience of taking a project through its entire lifecycle from inception, to mature released product.[2] The interns set up a blog, called Project Aardvark, where they posted updates on the progress of their project, to the world even though at that time the details of what they were working on was still a secret.
On July 1, 2005 the Project Aardvark team revealed that they were working on a remote assistance system for consumer use.[3]
Fog Creek Copilot uses a heavily modified version of TightVNC, a variant of Virtual Network Computing (VNC), as its core protocol. [4]
On November 7, 2005 they released a documentary on the interns' summer, titled Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, produced by Lerone D. Wilson of Boondoggle Films.[5]