Filed under: Humor, Cult of Mac
Tech Note 31 offline; no moof is good moof?
A moment of silence, please, for some pieces of apple lore that seems to have fallen victim to the unlink() of history and been relegated to the /dev/null of developer.apple.com. Last night I was trying to explain the concept of intersections of the canine and bovine coordinate systems to my (remarkably tolerant) girlfriend and went looking for the canonical dogcow reference, Macintosh Tecnical Note #31: The Dogcow (a.k.a. tn31). Imagine my surprise when it wasn't there! Nor were the first known recording of dogcow in the wild, or Brian Bechtel's A nest of dogcattle. They don't appear to have been relocated in the new scheme, either, just rm -f'd.
tn1031, History and Peregrinations: The Dogcow Goes QuickTime VR is still available, as is the Clarus 'SICN' resource in tn1019. But tn31, where we were first introduced to dogcow habits and habitats, first learned Clarus' name, and first heard the 'Moof!' of a real, live dogcow seems to be gone forever. fortunately for Clarus fans, most of the information conained in tn31, along with Mark Harlan's subsequent "History of the Dogcow" parts 1 & 2, is available at the the "official dogcow website,' Moof in Mind, and Freek Dijkstra has archived the original tn31, complete with 'Moof!' QT audio at MacFreek.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sean Flanagan said 2:20PM on 9-21-2005
Stop it! Stop it! This Technical Note is getting much too silly!
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Felipe said 2:35PM on 9-21-2005
huh??
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Jamie said 3:40PM on 9-21-2005
I taught high school journalism in the '80s, and my students used to debate the dog-ness vs. the cow-ness all the time when LaserWriting their "masterpieces" from their Mac Pluses with External Hard Drives. It became a running joke that eased lots of deadline tension. Apple needs to restore this page ASAP! Thanks for the nice trip down memory lane : )
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Wheels said 3:50PM on 9-21-2005
Maybe all the dogcows got Mad Dogcow Disease!
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Kristen said 3:51PM on 9-21-2005
What a sad day! At least Claris will live on in our hearts, and our desktops (http://www.macslack.com/ - see moofpaper).
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Andrew Shebanow said 5:03PM on 9-21-2005
It was Clarus, not Claris!
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Mingo Hagen said 6:14PM on 9-21-2005
It will always be here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040202021201/http://developer.apple.com/products/techsupport/dogcow/tn31.html
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Clark Goble said 6:42PM on 9-21-2005
So was Claris, Apple's shortlived software branch, a riff on Clarus the dogcow?
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poncho said 9:22PM on 9-21-2005
[pour one out for the Dogcow homie]
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Matthew Montano said 10:14PM on 9-21-2005
I owned a puce green Dogcow mouse pad for the longest time. I received it at an Apple II developers conference held at a convent in Kansas City (but that's a different story.)
It included inside the shrink wrap a story on the origins of the creature.
May Clarus rest in peace.
Matthew
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Xenedar said 10:46PM on 9-21-2005
Do they still have the icon garden?
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Brian said 1:03AM on 9-22-2005
To my knowledge, the Icon Garden has long since been removed, and only exists todady as a QT VR movie.
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Jacob Stetser said 3:48PM on 9-24-2005
No, Apple took down the icon garden a while back, but the name of my business has been for many years, in homage to Apple's work, icongarden.
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mark "the red" harlan (author of tech note 31) said 4:52PM on 9-30-2005
hey there,
jay's a bit late on the beat here, that tech. note has been missing for awhile.
there were actually three named dogcattle. clarus is the famous one (and yes, the name was a quasi-poke at the then-formed "claris"). there was also lackey the obnoxious talisman dogcow (it hung above cubes of newbies in dts), and moofo the psychic dogcow (a nod to a penn and teller act of the time called "mofo the psychic gorilla").
the icon garden, weirdly, included the wrong icon (the sicn instead of the icon). it's my understadning it was removed at the behest of steve jobs. also, technically, the removal of that garden was a violation of an agreement with the city of cupertino -- apple had told them that public art would be available on that spot (i *think* it was in response to the builing of infinite loop in front of the r&d campus) and then put up all that icon weirdness.
that mousepad matt has is valuable. especially if you still have the numbered information card, which aside from the technote, was the only other "true" piece written about the dogcow (it included mention of clarus's favorite food, which is found nowhere else). chris derossi found five still-sealed old ones and we sold them about a year ago on ebay -- i think he got more than $1,000 for the set one-at-a-time.
also, as an aside, pierre omidyar, founder of ebay, worked at claris for awhile (and for me at general magic when he built action web/ebay -- but that's another story).
my point, if i actually have one (and i may not), is that if you're going to get all whacked out about stuff like this changing, you should keep an eye on it yourself -- otherwise your fandom smacks of "me too-ness." because it was gone a long time ago.
pax,
m.
p.s. just how fitting *is* it that i can no longer donate blood because i lived in england for two years, and am considered a bovine spongiform (aka mad cow) risk?
p.p.s. thanks to scott "special k" knaster for pointing me at this site.
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Pierre-Alain Dorange said 2:19PM on 10-23-2005
The "nest of the dogcattle" was removed february 2004.
I own a web site dedicated to Clarus : "Clarus Museum" (see link below) so i follow Clarus news...
In the Apple Campus Garden, the Clarus model was not the sicn the original "z" from Cairo font (designed by Susan Kare in 1984), so it's in fact the first Clarus picture (she was not named at that moment).
"the nest of the dogcattle" was archived and can be see here :
Clarus Museum (i'm redesigned it) :
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Kevin said 1:53PM on 12-25-2005
2 Pierre-Alain Dorange:
Thank you, the site is superb!!! I really enjoyed surfing it.
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