So what was that thing about the hidden sheep, anyway, you ask? Well, the deconstruction of the original Mac font resources revealed something puzzling: in several of the fonts — though not all of them — there is an unexpected secret character hidden alongside all the normal ones.

You see, way back in the 1980s, there were a maximum of 256 different characters available. Different platforms mapped out their numeric character codes in slightly different ways. The original Macintosh used a system that would eventually come to be called Mac Roman. In 1984, it didn’t have a name yet, but it looked like this:

Source: Apple Inside Macintosh, Volume I (1985)

If you read the chart down the columns, moving left to right, you can see that this looks like the complete Chicago specimen reproduced earlier. In other words, Chicago has a font character for every one of the occupied boxes in the chart.

But two areas of the chart are empty: the left hand side, which are the low code numbers — by convention reserved for nonprinting control uses — and the right hand side, which, according to the caption: “Codes $D9 through $FF are reserved for future expansion.”

So those upper values (from hexadecimal value $D9 to the end at $FF) don’t correspond to any keys on the keyboard or any special combination for the international or symbol characters. So there’s no reason why any font would have any bitmap information included for a character code that couldn’t be accessed… right?

Genebaaaa

The 18-point version of Geneva includes all the characters you’d expect, and then, at position $D9, it has an adorable little sheep, shown at left. Other sizes of Geneva have different little icons in that location (a rabbit, a hieroglyph, a Mac icon). If you go down to the 9 point size, the sheep comes back again but is super tiny!

9 point baby sheep

Chicago doesn’t have any character at $D9. New York does though, different ones in each of the point sizes. Some of the images are repeats of icons otherwise available in the dingbat fonts (Cairo and Taliesin). But some, like the sheep, and like the cute paw prints, below, from Athens, weren’t — they were whimsical easter eggs.

If you knew what you were looking for, there were developer tools that could reveal the hidden images to you. But I don’t believe that there was any way you’d normally see or use these $D9 characters from within the classic Mac OS .

Full rendered character sets for many of the original Macintosh fonts are uploaded here if you’d like to look for all the hidden characters (or study the pixel grid design in a convenient format).

The classic Mac OS was very short on disk, RAM, and computing power. Susan Kare, Bill Atkinson, et al, did a very lot in both design and technology with very little, and even left us with hidden doodles to stumble across, all these years later.

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