Apple-themed April Fools' day pranks through the years

If it wasn't apparent already, today is April Fools' day and Apple's 35th birthday. To celebrate this occasion, Network World has compiled a list of popular Apple-themed April Fools' jokes from the past. Some are from Apple employees and some from the news media, but almost all of them are entertaining.

The most famous joke involves Clarus the Dogcow. Created by Susan Kare, designer of the happy-faced Mac computer icon, the black and white dog-slash-bovine became an integral part of the Page Setup dialog box in early versions of Mac OS.

Discussion of the cow-like dog icon continued internally within Apple's Developer and Technical Support (DTS) group until one member, Mark "The Red" Harlan, let loose the dogcow and named it Clarus in an Apple Technical document released on April 1, 1989. This off-the-cuff joke has taken on a life of its own and is now a part of Apple's pop culture history.

Other notable April Fools' jokes include Macworld's 2004 "wicked fast," triple-CPU system called the PowerMac G5 Cubed or iFixit's genuinely clever 2010 teardown analysis of the Apple tablet, otherwise known as the Newton MessagePad 2000. Oh yeah, we can't forget the April 1, 2006 date when we announced that TUAW was closing up shop.