Blast from the Past: Clarus, the Dogcow

There are two kinds of people^[1]. Say "moof" and some people will look at you a little funny. Others will laugh knowingly. The latter are acquainted with Clarus. She is the Apple dogcow. Developed as part of the Cairo icon font by Susan Kare, the dogcow eventually became the mascot of the Page Setup dialog box. Unclear as whether the picture was bovine or canine, the two taxonomies merged into the "dogcow", the creature who says "moof".

You can download a copy of Technical Note TN 1031 here (PDF). It's one of the few dogcow-related tech notes that still exist on the Apple server. For whatever reason, many of the original dogcow documents have been removed from developer.apple.com--you get redirected to the main page. MacFreek.nl has archived the text from Technical Note TN 31, the quintessential dogcow technote. This document answers the questions: "What is a Dogcow?", "But What Does This Have to do With the Macintosh?", and "Okay, So How Do I Draw a Dogcow?" It also points out that there are no known "cliff-dwelling dogcows" left in the wild.

In the end, Clarus the DogCow is a reminder that Apple was once smaller than it is now and that its employees actually had a sense of humor. You can find an excellent overview of the entire phenomenon at StoryBytes.

^[1] By definition, there are the kind of people who divide people into two kinds of people and there are the kind who do not.

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Source: http://www.storybytes.com/view-moof/articles/mim.html

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Humor Cult of Mac Retro Mac

There are two kinds of people[1]. Say "moof" and some people will look at you a little funny. Others will laugh knowingly. The latter are...

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Tonyola

There used to be a (buggy) piece of software called ClickChange which allowed you to change elements of the mac interface. One cute thing it had was an animated "running dogcow" to replace the "wait" beach ball. I miss that...

January 18 2007 at 12:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

rob reeves

I missed seeing the 'Public Art' on the Apple Campus by a very small margin, employee I asked when we were driving 'round the Infinite Loop said they had recently "been Steve-d."

I held onto the hope after the rumour that they would be back up but in OS X style glory for a while but at this point I think we can all say that isn't going to happen.

At least I have my DogCow wristwatch to look at (one of these days I *really* am going to get off my butt and order a shirt from Susan K's website) as well as an homage eMail address or two....

January 16 2007 at 2:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

yuji

moof can still be found in the image in the dev. document.
see fig 2-4 in
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Upgrading_HIToolbox/upgrading_hitoolbox_tasks/chapter_3_section_4.html

January 15 2007 at 10:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

sjmills

Hey, that looks like Dave Polaschek standing by Clarus!

January 15 2007 at 8:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jwest

I still have my Moof! t-shirt with Clarus on it. It must be close to 15 years old now. I never wear it because I want to be buried in it and it has to last. :)

January 15 2007 at 8:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Sam Highley

I love Clarus so much, I named my business after him, many years ago:

http://www.clarusdesign.com/

January 15 2007 at 4:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mingo Hagen

Another piece of dated Apple humor:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY2kWyqdxOI

January 15 2007 at 4:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Pepe

Gotta love Wikipedia :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moof

January 15 2007 at 3:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Luke

I remember this guy as a stamp in the old paint-esque app on OS 6 on my color classic. What was that program called again?

January 15 2007 at 3:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

matthew

"Apple was once smaller than it is now and that its employees actually had a sense of humor "

I remember Dogcow well, but Apple's sense of humor is still around. Definitely.

Remember when the original iPod shuffle shipped? The foot note read "Do not eat."

There's also stuff here and there in the KB docs, too.

January 15 2007 at 2:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply