Cairo was originally designed by Susan Kare in the early 80's for the first version of the Macintosh operating system. It first appeared on Mac 128K's in early January 1984. Susan didn't stop there. She also designed many legendary MacOS bits including the waste basket, the happy Mac and several other original Macintosh fonts (Chicago, New York,
San Francisco). With every font she created, she also designed custom dingbats for added interest. Susan liked the idea so much
that she ended up developing a whole font of fun dingbats. At Steve Job's urging, all the fonts were named after world cities so we can deduce that Cairo got it's name from Egypt's hieroglyphics.
In 1986, the laser printing development team at Apple used the iconic dogcow image (Cairo's z) to show the different printing options. The dog apparently had the wrong dimensions to fit in the already designated space so to fix the problem, she stretched and redrew it. The story goes that Mark Harlan (An Apple Developer and Technical Support Staff Member) made a joke about not being able to tell what sort of animal the dogcow was. "Everyone knew it was a dog," he said, "In fact, part of the joke early on was 'is this thing a cow?' because it so obviously wasn't. It's just that once you've had that idea planted it appears to be more cow-like... so now, that part of the joke has lost its impact. Everyone kind of accepts the ambiguity." The name of the dogcow came from Scott Zimmerman (Who worked on the Laser Printer Development Team) when he answered Mark Harlans' question. "It's both, OK? It's called a 'dogcow.' Now will you get out of my office?" That was in 1987. Dogcow was used in the printing options until 2001 when OS X was released.
By 1987 Apple had stopped distributing Cairo with it's computers. Luckily Cairo resurfaced in 1989 when Craig Hickman used some of the glyphs as stamp tools in the first version of Kid Pix. Many of the icons used in the program were based on Cairo as well, including the "Uh Oh!" guy. Craig was selling colour versions of Kid Pix for $25 until 1991 when Brøderbund offered to distribute the program. Kid Pix is still around today. The original black and white version is available for free through Shareware websites.
Since OSX was released, a lot of original Mac fonts have been lost because of advancing font technology. Cairo was only available for a short time, but it's cheerful characters played an important role in influencing a generation of computer users. Especially those of us who grew up using Macintosh computers and ended up as designers.
I restored Cairo for use on today's systems for the same reason Craig Hickman choose it as a base for stamps in Kid Pix - "I thought the pictures were too good not to be seen".
In 1986, the laser printing development team at Apple used the iconic dogcow image (Cairo's z) to show the different printing options. The dog apparently had the wrong dimensions to fit in the already designated space so to fix the problem, she stretched and redrew it. The story goes that Mark Harlan (An Apple Developer and Technical Support Staff Member) made a joke about not being able to tell what sort of animal the dogcow was. "Everyone knew it was a dog," he said, "In fact, part of the joke early on was 'is this thing a cow?' because it so obviously wasn't. It's just that once you've had that idea planted it appears to be more cow-like... so now, that part of the joke has lost its impact. Everyone kind of accepts the ambiguity." The name of the dogcow came from Scott Zimmerman (Who worked on the Laser Printer Development Team) when he answered Mark Harlans' question. "It's both, OK? It's called a 'dogcow.' Now will you get out of my office?" That was in 1987. Dogcow was used in the printing options until 2001 when OS X was released.
By 1987 Apple had stopped distributing Cairo with it's computers. Luckily Cairo resurfaced in 1989 when Craig Hickman used some of the glyphs as stamp tools in the first version of Kid Pix. Many of the icons used in the program were based on Cairo as well, including the "Uh Oh!" guy. Craig was selling colour versions of Kid Pix for $25 until 1991 when Brøderbund offered to distribute the program. Kid Pix is still around today. The original black and white version is available for free through Shareware websites.
Since OSX was released, a lot of original Mac fonts have been lost because of advancing font technology. Cairo was only available for a short time, but it's cheerful characters played an important role in influencing a generation of computer users. Especially those of us who grew up using Macintosh computers and ended up as designers.
I restored Cairo for use on today's systems for the same reason Craig Hickman choose it as a base for stamps in Kid Pix - "I thought the pictures were too good not to be seen".
