The Legend of the Dogcow
Moof! Any self respecting Mac fan should know of Clarus the Dogcow [via]! Originally created in 1983 as part of the Cairo font by Susan Kare as the glyph for ‘z’. At that time, the character had not been named Clarus nor was she recognised as a DogCow, rather it was just part of the first “dingbats” font in computer history
However, in 1986 Later the printing developer team (when Apple actually manufactured Laser printers) at Apple was looking for an image to show, in a very simple way, the different printing options. And to this day an unknown person suggested the small dog (z) from Susan’s Cairo font. With that the printing team adopted the small dog to show page orientations (Portrait/Landscape, Invert, Flip Horizontal, Flip Vertical and Precision Alignment) in the LaserWriter 4.0 driver set and was used in every OS until 7.1 Mac OS X (Though there are little haxies that can bring her back)
In 1987 the popular icon was officially named “Clarus” by the Apple team, and recognized as a dog cow creature. In 1993 – 1998 the glyph was then installed in an ‘icon garden‘ at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to celebrate classic icons from original MacOS.
To this date, the Dogcow is STILL the Apple Worldwide Developer Tech Support group mascot, still lingers on Apple’s website, and in true Microsoft style a variant of the dogcow in their PowerPoint presentation software, with a bell, and a fatter body.
[Information sourced from Wikipedia]
