The dogcow, named Clarus, is a bitmapped image designed by Apple for the demonstration of page layout in the classic Mac OS. The sound she makes is "Moof!", a portmanteau of "moo" and "woof". Clarus became the archetype of surrealistic humor in the corporate culture of the original Macintosh group, particularly as the mascot of Apple’s Developer Technical Support as officially documented in Technote #31.
History
In 1983, the dog icon had been created by Susan Kare as the glyph for "z", as part of the Cairo font. Later, when redesigning the classic Mac OS "Page Setup" print dialog box for the LaserWriter, an example image was required. According to HCI engineer Annette Wagner,
For the LaserWriter there was a print dialog with checkbox options that could all be mixed with each other. We needed some kind of graphic that would show flipping horizontal, flipping vertical, 2% reduction, mirror effects, six or eight kinds of effects. We had this typeface of crazy symbols that came off the Macintosh that Susan Kare had originally done, that had all these craze critters inside it. I had to...