Page Setup

Applied to the whole document.

CLARUS THE DOGCOW

She is not a dog. She is not a cow. She started life in 1983 as a spotted dog on the z key of a font, was enlarged and re-spotted for a print dialog until nobody could tell what she was, got declared a dogcow in 1987 and an Apple technical note in 1989, became the password of a whole generation of Mac programmers, disappeared, and came back.

This page is a document. The dialog on the right is her old job. Use it on the whole page and you'll see what she did all day. ⌘⇧P jumps to it, the same shortcut that summons her on a real Mac.

CA: 0x22ea949763db855880264a8fb689e07021661e18

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Page Setup
No dogcow loaded Put your picture at assets/clarus.png and she'll appear on the sheet.
Orientation and scale
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The whole meme started because nobody could classify a tiny bitmap animal. Susan Kare drew a dog. Annette Wagner's edits for the print dialog made the spots read as cow. Apple's developer support group settled it the only honest way: she is both, she is neither, she is a dogcow.

You are welcome to try. The instrument below has been calibrated against Technical Note #31 and cannot be wrong.

Species Analyzer
DOGCOW

Verdict: DOGCOW. Perfectly balanced. As all things should be, according to a font from 1983.

Cairo

Born on the z key

Susan Kare draws Cairo, a picture font for the Macintosh, while the machine is still being built. On the z key she puts a small spotted dog. The font ships with the first Mac in January 1984. Nobody has called her anything yet.

LaserWriter

Gets a job

Annette Wagner, designing the LaserWriter's Page Setup options, borrows the Cairo dog, enlarges her, gives her a clear front and back, and moves her spots. She comes out looking bovine. On 15 October, Scott "Zz" Zimmerman in developer support, worn down by Mark Harlan asking dog or cow, rules that it is a dogcow. Ginger Jernigan may have said it first.

Tech Note #31

Gets a biography

Mark "The Red" Harlan writes Technical Note #31 in the flattest engineering voice available. It gives her a name, a sound, a gender, a species of her own and a trademark notice. All of it deadpan. All of it canon. In 1994 he writes two more chapters in develop magazine.

QuickTime

Goes multimedia

Zimmerman renders her into early QuickTime demos, a day of Mac IIfx time per clip. In 1993 a giant Clarus joins the Icon Garden outside Apple's Infinite Loop campus, where she stands until 1998. Technical Note 1031 later documents her QuickTime VR career with equal seriousness.

Cult

The handshake

"Moof!" is how Mac programmers greet each other on Usenet, mailing lists and at conferences. T-shirts, pins, mousepads, a beer called Moof Bräu at WWDC 1996, easter eggs in shipping software. Knowing her name meant you were in.

Mac OS X

The fade

Mac OS X's rebuilt printing system drops her from Page Setup; she gets one cameo in Address Book. The trademarks had already been cancelled in 1999. Fans start a Save Our Dogcow petition and a hack called ClarusX to put her back. The tech note vanishes from Apple's site.

Ventura

Moof returns

She had been creeping back for years: an example in the Swift manual, a Messages sticker pack, a WWDC 2018 pin, an iPhone keyboard that suggests a dog and a cow when you type Moof. Then macOS Ventura's new Page Setup dialog puts her back where she started, redrawn in smooth vectors. In 2026 a Developer app sticker shows her walking on four legs, which purists consider a scandal.

Every confirmed appearance
  1. 1983Susan Kare draws a spotted dog for the z key of the Cairo font.
  2. 1984Cairo ships with the first Macintosh in January. She is on every Mac, unnoticed.
  3. 1987Annette Wagner reworks her for the LaserWriter Page Setup options dialog. 15 October: Scott Zimmerman declares her a dogcow.
  4. 1988First public outing, reportedly on badges at the WWDC debugging labs.
  5. 1989Technical Note #31, "The Dogcow." She is named Clarus and given a voice.
  6. 1991Early QuickTime demo movies star a spinning, riding, flipping dogcow.
  7. 1992System 7.1 is the last Mac OS to ship the Cairo font. The original glyph retires; the Page Setup version carries on.
  8. 1993A giant Clarus is installed in the Icon Garden at 1 Infinite Loop.
  9. 1994"History of the Dogcow" parts 1 and 2 in develop magazine. She stars in a QuickTime VR object movie.
  10. 1996Technical Note 1031, "The Dogcow Goes QuickTime VR." Moof Bräu is poured at WWDC. A 101 Dalmatians print program hides her as an easter egg.
  11. 1998The Icon Garden comes down.
  12. 1999The "Moof!" and dogcow trademark registrations are cancelled.
  13. 2000"Adventures with Clarus," a late developer document, is published.
  14. 2001Mac OS X ships without her in Page Setup. She gets a cameo in Address Book. Fans petition; ClarusX puts her back by hand.
  15. 2010sApple's Swift manual declares a constant named with a dog emoji and a cow emoji. Its value is "dogcow."
  16. 2016She appears in Apple's Classic Mac sticker pack for Messages.
  17. 2018WWDC attendees find a Clarus pin in their swag.
  18. 2022March: the iPhone keyboard suggests a dog and a cow when you type Clarus or Moof. June: macOS Ventura's Page Setup dialog brings her back, redrawn.
  19. 2025A Clarus watch face appears on the Apple Watch Hermès.
  20. 2026The Apple Developer app adds a sticker of her walking. On four legs.

Assembled from the sources in the reading list. Sightings marked "reportedly" rest on fan archives alone.

Field notes (unofficial)
  1. §1
    Her name is Clarus. It is a pun on Claris, the software company Apple spun off in 1987. The pun outlived the company.
  2. §2
    She says Moof! It is moo plus woof, and the exclamation mark is not optional.
  3. §3
    She is a she. Never "it".
  4. §4
    She is not a dog and she is not a cow. She is a dogcow, a species with a total population of one.
  5. §5
    Susan Kare drew her in 1983 as a spotted dog for the z key of the Cairo font. Annette Wagner enlarged her and moved her spots for the Page Setup dialog. The cow came in with the edits.
  6. §6
    Her day job was demonstrating Flip Horizontal, Flip Vertical and Invert Image in the LaserWriter Page Setup dialog. She was very good at it.
  7. §7
    Her official biography is Apple Technical Note #31, written with a completely straight face.
  8. §8
    "Moof!" was once a registered trademark of Apple Computer. So was she. The registrations were cancelled in 1999. She was not.
  9. §9
    She vanished from Mac OS X and returned in macOS Ventura in 2022, without an announcement, as if she'd only stepped out.
  10. §10
    Apple's own Swift manual once declared a variable named with a dog emoji and a cow emoji. Its value was "dogcow".
  11. §11
    Say "Moof!" to any Mac developer over forty and they will say it back. This has been tested.

Everything above is paraphrased. The real Technical Note #31 is Apple's and is funnier than this; it's first on the reading list.

A dogcow's call, synthesized from scratch. The real recording exists: Scott Zimmerman made it one night in his apartment by blending a stock cow with himself saying "oof". Ours is an approximation. Press the button anyway.

Typing m o o f anywhere on this page summons the herd.

Moofs emitted: 0Rank: visitor

Dogcows are two-dimensional and stand on edge when they don't want to be seen, which makes them hard to interview. Clarus will nonetheless take one question at a time.

She answers in Moof. A translation is provided as a courtesy. Its accuracy is not guaranteed by anyone.

Ask Clarus

Awaiting a question. She is currently on edge.

For a decade, knowing this stuff was the difference between a Mac user and a Mac developer. Ten questions. No partial credit; she is a bitmap.

Your best score is kept. So is your shame.

Developer Technical Support entrance exam
Question 1 of 10

Cairo

In the Cairo font, every key held a little picture: a flower, a hand, a bus. The z key held her. Type it here and she'll come out, exactly as she did on a Macintosh in 1984.

Physical keyboards work too.

Reading list

Links go to other people's sites and may move. If one breaks, the title is enough to find it again.