Dogcow

The dogcow, also known as "Clarus", is a bitmapped image first introduced by Apple Computer.

Appearance
According to a technical note provided by Apple Computer in 1989, the dogcow visually resembles a dog with a nose and spots like a cow. As cows are female, the dogcow is also female (a male would be a dogbull). Dogcows do not "mooo" like a cow or "woof" like a dog, they say Moof! (trademarked by Apple Computer)

History
The dogcow image was originally created in 1983 as part of the Cairo font by Susan Kare as the glyph for the character 'z'. Annette Wagner used the image in the LaserWriter driver because it could convey scale and orientation.



Scott "Zz" Zimmerman provided printer support in Apple Computer's Developer Technical Support department and verbally called it a "dogcow" on October 15, 1987 after repeated inquiries about the mysterious creature. Ginger Jernigan on the team was known to have first used the term. The dogcow was named "Clarus" by Mark "The Red" Harlan, who wrote the semi-official tech support document about it in March 1989. Harlan used Mac-a-Mug Pro to simulate the appearance of Zimmerman in a diagram of how not to display a dogcow.

Legacy
Apple CEO John Sculley wore a dogcow button during his keynote speech at the 1988 Worldwide Developers Conference where it began to attain cult status.

The dogcow's image was used to efficiently show the orientation, scale (and later color) of a page to be printed in the Page Setup dialog box of early classic Mac OS versions up to 9.2.2. The more sophisticated print dialog in Mac OS X replaced the dogcow with the actual scaled-down contents of the page to be printed. Fans requested that Apple bring the dogcow back and some 3rd-party hacks were created for that purpose.

The dogcow became available as a part of the Classic Mac sticker pack for iOS 10 or later from the App Store.



Reinstatement
In 2022, the dogcow was reinstated in the Page Setup dialog box of macOS Ventura (version 13) to preview orientation when no specific content has been selected for printing. When the standard Print command is invoked, the dialog will instead show thumbnails of the actual contents to be printed.

Articles

 * Mac Nostalgia: A Look Back at Clarus the Dogcow by Mitchel Broussard at MacRumors (2019-03-08)
 * We miss you, Clarus the dogcow by Christopher Phin at Macworld (2015-05-26)
 * Nerd History: Clarus the Dogcow by Chris Higgins at Mental Floss (2008-03-06)
 * Meet the Dogcow and Learn the Truth about Moof! by Mark Stanley Bubien at Story Bytes (archived 2000-03-03)
 * Moof! Remembering Clarus the DogCow by Adam Rosen at Vintage Mac Museum (2018-12-21)

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