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 1

A brief history of Clarus the Dogcow

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2024-08-31 14:00:02

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.