A brief history of Clarus the Dogcow

There aren’t many mythical animals in operating systems, and the most famous of those is probably Tux the penguin who appeared in Linux around 1996. The Mac’s first mythical animal predates that by more than a decade, and is the distinctive dogcow named Clarus, who appeared in every version of Mac OS until Mac OS X.

When Annette Wagner was designing the Page Setup dialog for Classic Mac OS, she needed a figure to place on the page to show the user its orientation and other options. She was working with an early symbolic font Cairo, created by Susan Kare who was also the designer of Chicago, the first Mac system font, and modified its z character of a dog to make it work better in the dialog. The result was a creature that looked like a hybrid between a dog and a cow.

In 1987, Scott ‘Zz’ Zimmerman coined the term dogcow for this curious beast, which by now was featured in every Page Setup dialog on every Mac, and was becoming quite a celebrity. A little later, Mark ‘The Red’ Harlan gave the dogcow the name of Clarus, a variation on the name of Claris, Apple’s software subsidiary that had been formed in 1987.

As Apple’s campus at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, developed, Clarus was one of several large plastic figures forming the Icon Garden in front of the offices.

The dogcow lived on in Page Setup dialogs until Mac OS X was released, and early in the 2000s she was put out to grass in favour of a stylised icon of a human figure. Those who pined for the reappearance of the dogcow in OS X remained disappointed until macOS Ventura, when she finally returned, although now in full vector graphics glory.

By this time, there was another reference to Clarus tucked away as an Easter Egg in the Emoji & Symbols viewer: type the letters of her name into its search box, and you’ll see the two emoji characters of a dog and a cow, although neither of them resembles Clarus in appearance.

Although not heard in Mac OS, Clarus has been attributed the sound of moof, a portmanteau of moo and woof, of course.

The next time you open the Page Setup dialog, spare a thought for Clarus the dogcow, still doing the same job nearly forty years later.

References

Wikipedia
Macintosh Technical Note 31: The Dogcow, April 1989, written by Mark “The Red” Harlan
History of the Dogcow Part 1, MacTech, by Mark “The Red” Harlan
History of the Dogcow Part 2, MacTech, by Mark “The Red” Harlan