Hope you all are a little more educated after reading this article. :)
Have a great summer people.
--Steve
Steven Bytnar (DDsteve@irc) | "That is why it is called a
s-bytnar@uiuc.edu | development version. They don't
<-Unofficial self-proclaimed MRE-> | even know if all the bugs are
Macintosh Reverse Engineer =) | _in_ it yet."
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- MooooOOOOF! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
* How It All Began
The dogcow was originally a character in the Cairo font that used to ship
with the Macintosh; it was designed by Susan Kare. I had always been
interested in this critter ever since I first saw it in the LaserWriter
Page Setup Options dialog, sometime during my stint in Apple's Developer
Technical Support (DTS) group in 1987. To me it showed perfection in human
interface design. With one picture it was very easy to explain concepts
like an inverted image or larger print area that otherwise would be nearly
impossible to communicate.
Interest became an obsession when one day I was talking to Scott ("Zz")
Zimmerman about the dialog and suddenly thought, "Just what is that animal
supposed to be, anyway?" Since Zz was the Printing Guy in DTS (now in the
Newton group), and my favorite pastime was to bother him endlessly anyway,
I started pressing him on whether the animal was a dog or a cow.
In an act of desperation he said, "It's both, OK? It's called a 'dogcow.'
Now will you get out of my office?" The date was October 15, 1987, and I
consider this to be the first use of the term. It should be noted that
since then a few people (including Ginger herself) have told me that
actually the phrase was coined by Ginger Jernigan (ex-DTS, now ROM
software) at a meeting of Apple's Print Shop sometime shortly before that,
which very well could be the case. Nevertheless it was Zz who pressed it
into common usage, and he certainly was the first person I ever heard use
the term.
Zz's ploy to get me out of his office was futile, however, because then I
stood around and postulated that the dogcow's genes would have a radical
effect on its behavior, and it must not bark or moo, but rather utter a
combination like "Boo-woo!" or "Moof!"
We both thought it was funny enough that we decided to press it into
everyday usage, and I started circulating the dogcow with "Moof!" on
internal memos. The idea caught on, and at the 1988 Worldwide Developers
Conference we gave away dogcow buttons in the debugging lab. Louella
Pizzuti (ex-DTS, ex-develop editor, now citizen of the world) came up with
the great idea of making the background Mountain Dew green. Response to the
buttons was huge, and no one was smiling more than the DTS folks when John
Sculley wore one for his keynote speech. It was a major-league coup.
* The Origin of Tech Note #31
Then things started to spin out of control. Various groups internally
started picking up the dogcow logo and doing things that didn't seem, well,
DTS-like. The final straw was when the dogcow pin appeared in a Microsoft
advertisement. Mark Johnson (ex-DTS, now in Apple Europe) approached me and
suggested that we throw down the gauntlet and write a Technical Note on the
subject. I balked out of nothing more than sheer laziness.
Some time passed and we were getting ready to go with the April 1989 batch
of Tech Notes when Mark approached me again, saying that he thought having
an April Fool's edition describing the dogcow would be perfect. I said yes
but then stalled and stalled, missing two deadlines, and I thought the Tech
Note wasn't going to happen.
Mark marched in my office one day in March of 1989 at 11:30 a.m. announcing
that Tech Notes were shipping at noon and implied that my manliness was in
question if I didn't get that Note in the batch. My macho instincts just
couldn't allow that to happen, so Tech Note #31, "The Dogcow," was written
in literally 40 minutes in one pass. I'd been thinking about it for quite
some time, so I knew pretty much how it would go; I just sat down and typed
it out. Given more time I definitely would have churned out something a bit
more polished, and part of its quirkiness, I'm sure, is due to the time
pressure I was under.
One thing was certain: it had to be something original in concept. I've
always had a deep disdain for people who rip off comedic stuff. You know,
the same people who used to have to tell all their jokes with an English
accent because of Monty Python are now those who say "Not!" behind phrases.
Once is funny, but after a while it gets really old. I definitely wanted it
out of the mainstream.
For numbering I wanted to use e, but Mark pointed out that there had been
confusion early on in the Tech Note numbering scheme and that a few numbers
had been left out for various reasons. He showed me some conversations from
the net that went on and on about Tech Note #31 and people's guesses as to
why it was missing. (People were really, really out there with their
guessing; anyone who's a believer in conspiracy theories would have enjoyed
this blatant gibberish.) The number 31 had the right feel; it would blend
into the regular batch better than e, and I've always had a soft spot for
prime numbers, so we picked it.
Sports Illustrated had run a great fake story about a Zen baseball pitcher
sometime earlier and we borrowed the idea of having the words "April
Fool's" spelled out within the article from them - in our case using the
first letter of every line of the poem at the closing. No one has ever
mentioned this to me, so few people must have caught it.
There's a picture of the wrong way to draw the dogcow that several people
thought was a scanned image of Zz. Actually, completely independently of
the Tech Note, I'd been using a program called Mac-a-Mug, designed to make
mug shots, and came across a set of hair that looked frighteningly like
Zz's. After fiddling around with the program a bit I was able to come up
with a good rendition of Zz's head, and I shoved it into the Tech Note
without his ever knowing about it. The expression (and color) of his face
when he learned about the picture is a memory I'll always cherish.
The Note also contains the expression "Aanal, Enacku Naiimadu, Kaanali!"
People came up with very unusual anagrams or unusual explanations for what
it meant, the best being that it was an obscure reference to a clip of The
Day the Earth Stood Still that had been cut from the film. But the truth is
that it's phoneticized Tamil that was supplied by Sriram Subramanian
(Networking Guy, ex-DTS, ex-Taligent, now in Apple Japan) meaning "But I
can't see the dogcow!"
Ironically, there's also a mistake in that the "correct" way to draw the
dogcow is actually wrong. We ended up being so pressured for time in
getting the Note out the door that we just jammed it into a weird
PostScript file that ended up mutating the shape. Shortly after the release
of that Note, Chris Derossi (ex-DTS, now at General Magic) convinced me
that a better solution was to have the correct way to draw the dogcow be
pixelated, to avoid these idiosyncracies in the future - which is what's
now done.
* Next Time
There will be more history of the dogcow in a future issue of develop. Have
you ever wondered if you have the entire set of dogcow pins? Is that dogcow
T-shirt of your cubemate's bootlegged? Is there any way things can get more
meaningless? Some, but not all, of these questions will be answered the
next time we have a little extra space to fill.
[This clip was from develop. develop, Apple's quarterly technical journal,
provides an in-depth look at code and techniques that have been reviewed
for robustness by Apple engineers. Each issue comes with a CD that contains
the source code for that issue, as well as all back issues, Technical
Notes, sample code, and other useful software and documentation.
Subscriptions to develop are available through APDA (1-800-282-2732),
AppleLink DEV.SUBS, or Internet dev.subs@applelink.apple.com. Copyright
1995, Apple Computer, Inc. All rights reserved. develop is a trademark of
Apple Computer, Inc.]