Learn the Truth about Moof!

To understand why Moof! is such an important sound, you need to know a little about what it means to be a dogcow—which requires a bit of insight into its creation.

As the Apple developers were working on the original version of the Macintosh Operating System (MacOS), they realized a few things. First off, they knew they were on the cutting edge of the computer industry—developing a computer that anyone (not just other programmers) would be able to use. They also realized that not a single one of them could draw worth beans.

Learn the Truth about Moof!

That’s when Andy Hertzfeld,

one of the MacOS programmers,

They needed small images to represent common activities on the computer: starting up, deleting files, showing your printer paper orientation, and waiting for things to happen (this was the early ’80s, when waiting tended to be a very common activity). Mr. Hertzfeld instructed his friend to go to the store, buy some graph paper, and fill in the squares to make pictures.

1. Ms. Kare did as he asked, and she was soon
2. a full-fledged developer on the Macintosh team (and probably the one

• She drew a happy-faced Mac to tell the user all was well when the computer was coming on (as well as the sad-faced Mac to tell you when things had gone haywire). Appropriately,
• she designed the trash can, where users dumped unwanted files, a
• nd a small wristwatch which appeared when things were taking time (the only drawback was that you couldn’t tap this wristwatch impatiently in anticipation).

Ms. Kare also designed many of the Macintosh’s fonts, including Chicago, Geneva and New York. These fonts all had one or two little pictures which she added to spice things up. “Right before the Mac shipped in 1984, I had added a hieroglyphic sort of character to each of the original Macintosh bitmap fonts,” Ms. Kare says.

She liked this idea so much, she decided to develop a whole font full of these hieroglyphic characters. It seems like it would be a meticulous process choosing the images to place in a font, but Ms. Kare approached the task with an attitude befitting an Apple developer. “Most of the