The Origin of the Blinking Cursor (inverse.com) 99
Long-time Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket shares a new article from the technology site Inverse exploring the origin of blinking cursors.
They trace the invention to the 1960s and electronics engineer Charles Kiesling, a naval veteran of the Korean War who "spent his immediate post-war years on a new challenge: the exploding computing age." Still decades away from personal computers — let alone portable ones — Kiesling was joining the ranks of engineers tinkering with room-sized computers like the IBM 650 or the aging ENIAC. He joined Sperry Rand, now Unisys, in 1955, and helped develop the kind of computer guts that casual users rarely think about. This includes innards like logic circuitry, which enable your computer to make complex conditional decisions like "or," "and," or "if only" instead of simply "yes" or "no". One of these seemingly innocuous advancements was a 1967 patent filing Kiesling made for a blinking cursor...."
According to a post on a computer science message board from a user purporting to be Kiesling's son, the inspiration for this invention was simply utility. "I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor, and it was simple," Kiesling's son writes. "He said there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."
The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text.
The article credits Apple with popularizing blinking cursors to the masses. And it also remembers a fun story about Steve Jobs (shared by Thomas Haigh, a professor of technology history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): While he was in support of the blinking cursor itself, Haigh says Steve Jobs was famously against controlling it using cursor keys. Jobs attempted — and failed — to remove these keys from the original Mac in an effort to force users into using a mouse instead. In an interaction with biographer Walter Isaacson years later, he even pried them off with his car keys before signing his autograph on the keyboard.
They trace the invention to the 1960s and electronics engineer Charles Kiesling, a naval veteran of the Korean War who "spent his immediate post-war years on a new challenge: the exploding computing age." Still decades away from personal computers — let alone portable ones — Kiesling was joining the ranks of engineers tinkering with room-sized computers like the IBM 650 or the aging ENIAC. He joined Sperry Rand, now Unisys, in 1955, and helped develop the kind of computer guts that casual users rarely think about. This includes innards like logic circuitry, which enable your computer to make complex conditional decisions like "or," "and," or "if only" instead of simply "yes" or "no". One of these seemingly innocuous advancements was a 1967 patent filing Kiesling made for a blinking cursor...."
According to a post on a computer science message board from a user purporting to be Kiesling's son, the inspiration for this invention was simply utility. "I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor, and it was simple," Kiesling's son writes. "He said there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."
The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text.
The article credits Apple with popularizing blinking cursors to the masses. And it also remembers a fun story about Steve Jobs (shared by Thomas Haigh, a professor of technology history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): While he was in support of the blinking cursor itself, Haigh says Steve Jobs was famously against controlling it using cursor keys. Jobs attempted — and failed — to remove these keys from the original Mac in an effort to force users into using a mouse instead. In an interaction with biographer Walter Isaacson years later, he even pried them off with his car keys before signing his autograph on the keyboard.
Just one mystery for me though. (Score:2)
Why does the cursor stop blink after a while? That just means you need to fiddle around to figure out where it is.
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Why does the cursor stop blink after a while?
Isn't it only if the window loses focus?
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Nope, it stops blinking after a few seconds. Windows 10, both Firefox and Notepad has the same behavior.
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Windows 10, both Firefox and Notepad
Well, then submit a bug report to Microsoft. /s
(Firefox is not doing that under linux)
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huh, you are correct. I just fired Notepad up (I am not using it, favoring Notepad++) and indeed, it blinks a few times, then stops.
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The computer is still busy with things so that don't make sense. And the computer I run is not running on batteries.
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The computer is still busy with things so that don't make sense
If you're referring to Windows I think you've mistyped that, it should have been:
The computer is still busy with things that don't make sense
FTFY.
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It's a "feature" of Windows 10. To fix it, set HKCUControl Panel\Desktop\CaretTimeout to 0xFF FF FF FF.
"Thank Satya, kids".
"Thaaanks, Satya".
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Why does the cursor stop blink after a while?
Isn't it only if the window loses focus?
No, it must be to save power. Do you realize how much juice it takes to flip the cursor on and off?
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Why does the cursor stop blink after a while?
Isn't it only if the window loses focus?
No, it must be to save power. Do you realize how much juice it takes to flip the cursor on and off?
For Windows, just over 129 million machine cycles, since it has to update fifteen different background tasks that do nothing, send telemetry that the cursor has blinked to Redmond, update three different log files (permanently locked so they can't be deleted), and pass data across five system processes that exist mostly to pass it to other system processes.
You'll note that a previous poster said that this doesn't happen under Linux. Now you know why.
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Better joke than mine. You are joking, right? Or maybe you have an insider feeding you the truth about Windows internals...
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You are joking, right?
Looks like Poe's Law applies to Microsoft too.
Come to think of it, for all I know it could actually be true.
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Another symptom of the today's problems is the universalization of Poe's Law? I need to check what Q is saying...
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It's because some UX designer thought that a blinking cursor was visually unappealing, so once again, in our "modern" UI, we sacrifice functionality for the sake of aesthetics. Clearly, since they've worked perfectly for the last 54 years, the blinking cursor was in dire need of a design refresh.
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In Batman, you either die the hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
In programming, you either die the ultimate debugger, or live long enough to see the young punks making the same mistakes generation after generation.
Microsoft has been screwing up smart copy/paste for 30 years.
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Haha, I gotta come to MS's defense on this one. The most screwed up copy paste is in LibreOffice. ...Because they were going to improve on what worked just fine.
Re: Just one mystery for me though. (Score:1)
Article is bulkshit (Score:4, Informative)
Early computers were teletype interfaces without blinking cursors ( duh).
Eventually we got Carhode ray tube interfaces however these were NOT like the ones we use today. They were based I'd storage oscilloscopes in which you could, like an etchasketch, write one time. You then had to erase the entire screen when the text reached the bottom and start over on a blank slate at the top. Scrolling was not possible. And while there were ways to have a decaying write like a blinking cursor they were like the writes to a non-storage oscilloscope. If the cursor was at a single position too long it either depleted tge phosphor response or if the gain wa up then it often wrote anyhow. So why technically possible these were not very beneficial. The reason people used storage scopes was to avoid having to rewrite the screen at 60hz. And it allowed vector graphics. However there wasn't enough computer memory to store what was in the screen so refresh was impossible.
However it had an additional advantage over the next generation of refresh screens. You could have windows.
The next generation of 60 refresh screens were like the TV crt. There they did have the refresh but you could only write characters since as noted there wasn't enough memory to store all the pixel states. At first these emulated teletypes where your new text appears only at the bottom . So again no blinking cursor needed.
But that's when it became possible.
However the article still gets it wrong. Blinking text like Woz was worrying about was different than a blinking cursor. Blinking text could be anywhere in the screen simultaneously. This meant the stored character ascii number had to encode the blink bit. A blinking cursor however was only in one place in the screen. This could be implemented in software by toggling the character periodically or in hardware by having a special register on the graphics card that contained the coordinates of the character to blink. So blinking text was unrelated conceptually or in hardware to the blinking cursor.
The timeline of this article seems all messed up
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And nowdays they are trying to ban Cathode Ray Tubes, especially in schools.
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Obviously the author does not understand the subject matter, the description of logic is hilarious in how it misses the point and manages to put so many mistakes in just one sentence, while probably sounding completely reasonable and unremarkable to most:
That was the impression I got as well. Dear god, what a mass of incoherent drivel containing almost no information related to what the subject promised. It was like the author worked for a wine grower's magazine and tried to pad the article out as much as possible to cover up the fact that he had no idea what it was he was writing about.
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Someone in this conversation never used a Teletype (TM, or "teletype", generic clone) and watched the head clatter the characters as you typed them, then (this is the important bit) stop when you stopped, leaving this huge great printing head (golfball, flying typehead capture slots, or dot-matrix head with ribbon cartridge) chuntering gently at the point where you were in your line of entry. Sort of, like a blinking cursor, but made
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Chuntering is the perfect word to describe that effect. Though perhaps one has to have seen it to know what you mean.
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Yet one more way Windows 10/11 is a downgrade that you have to spend weeks unfucking every time you install it or it updates.
And it's fucking incomprehensible to be on a technical site like this and I can't fucking type out 0x followed by 8 F's. FIX THE LAME LAMENESS FILTER YOU LAMERS.
tl:dr (Score:4, Informative)
Also software not locked up, software cursors (Score:2)
"The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text." That's all that was needed.
It also lets you know the software has not locked up. The cursors did not start out hardware based, they were software.
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"The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text." That's all that was needed.
It also lets you know the software has not locked up. The cursors did not start out hardware based, they were software.
You have a hardware-based cursor?? If you make it blink more slowly can you use those idle cycles to mine bitcoin?
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You have a hardware-based cursor??
Well I used to when I had a terminal, and on PCs in text mode.
If you make it blink more slowly can you use those idle cycles to mine bitcoin?
It would have to be Monero since I would need to be smoking to do that. :-)
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The first cursors I ever saw were on terminals, not computers. The computers were just mainframes or minis. A blinking cursor in that environment tells you nothing about whether or not the computer is working.
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The first cursors I ever saw were on terminals, not computers. The computers were just mainframes or minis. A blinking cursor in that environment tells you nothing about whether or not the computer is working.
Nope, they were on highly specialized and dedicated special purpose electronics. Like scopes and displays in naval electronics.
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"The cursors did not start out hardware based, they were software."
Uhhh, No.
Blinking cursors had ZERO to do with the computer and everything to do with the terminal.
Until the Apple I came along, EVERYTHING was a terminal. Often a literal teletype or other slow physical teleprinter. On one of those, you could tell by looking at the print head where you were
The kewl kids got CRT terminals. Those still had little relation to what the computer was doing "real time"
Then DEC came along and invented extended A
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Blinking cursors had ZERO to do with the computer and everything to do with the terminal. Until the Apple I came along, EVERYTHING was a terminal.
Nope, they were on highly specialized and dedicated special purpose electronics. Like scopes and displays in Naval electronics, Air Force electronics.
Blinking (Score:2)
The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text.
Seriously? Isn't that kind of obvious?
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Seriously? Isn't that kind of obvious?
Not for everyone. There is a lot of overlap with those who think the reason it’s called a cursor is it lets you swear on the internet.
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You'd think. But we live in a society where morons have to be told a cup of coffee is hot so as not to spill it on themselves. I'd love to think that most people know the human eye (and probably most animals) is highly attuned to any kind of movement or sudden change in the field of vision but I'm probably wrong.
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No, we live in a society where businesses serve coffee that is supposed to be served at about 140F [washingtonpost.com] at nearly 190F [vox.com] because then it stays warmer longer. Coffee served at even 160F will "cause third-degree burns in about 60 seconds, rather than in two to seven seconds [ttla.com], which means that spillage is a temporary accident, as opposed to something that causes near instant and permanent injury because it
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Oooo , a tiggered AC, I'm soo scared !!
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SuperKendall increasely posting as AC these days.
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"Minimum (wage) training, loose franchising rule, lack of regulatory compliance."
The third for sure, the first two NO. The excess temperature was deliberate and intentional. That is not controversial and has nothing to do with poor training or loose rules. It was policy.
"Basically, this was a true Libertarian outcome that could have been avoided with a more modern "collective good" civilization; the USA has just gotten worse in that area too over the past few years."
It should also be known that victim di
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This blinking cursor was invented in in the 70s, before this modern era of idiots using computers. Back then you had to know what you were doing when you used a computer. I have indeed used some CRTs that did not have blinking cursors, things like vector displays where blinking just wasn't viable, and some long persistence displays where blinking just won't work.
But the lack of blinking didn't matter much in some ways. The next character you types was going to appear on the last line of the display, just
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And they forgot to say what really was important, it that blinking can be implemented with an XOR operation, which can be computed easily even on the early machines.
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And they forgot to say what really was important, it that blinking can be implemented with an XOR operation, which can be computed easily even on the early machines.
And when software based it lets you know the system is not locked up
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Hmm, at the time the terminals were independent from the computers. The blinking is effectively done in hardware and the computer does nothing more than send ASCII or EBCDIC characters. The terminal might have firmware but even then the blinking might be implemented merely as alternating between two glyphs using a timer. XOR stuff became more popular on computers that directly controlled a video display, such as the early workstations. Before then usually the video display controlled by a computer was us
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In hindsight, yes. Thankfully hindsight bias does not invalidate patents. Lots of things are obvious once you've seen the idea.
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It is now. Back then though the CRT based terminal displays were an alternative to teletypes and other printer based terminals, none of which even had cursors.
Nice Illustration of the Downside to Jobs (Score:2)
Jobs attempted — and failed — to remove these keys from the original Mac in an effort to force users into using a mouse instead.
Brilliant businessman beyond dispute, and an industry visionary (in several industries). But this anecdote highlights a persistent problem with Jobs (aside from things like being a sociopath who never cared about other people, not even his own daughter) - that he constantly wanted to force his own choices on users even when it undercut the product. It is a good thing that he failed with this (stupid) choice. He did succeed in undercutting the original Mac by deliberately making it as non-expandable as he co
Groups make better decisions, S Jobs shows that (Score:2)
Brilliant businessman beyond dispute, and an industry visionary (in several industries). But this anecdote highlights a persistent problem with Jobs
No, it shows a problem with any one man show. Psychologists have shown over and over that groups generally make better decisions than individuals, even experts and the gifted.
As an example consider Jobs, his initial success is due to collaboration with Wozniak, not his brilliance alone. His later success had a bit of collaboration too. When he got into trouble was when he was unrestrained.
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Psychology "shows" a lot of unverifiable shite. It's bunk science.
Businesses need one man to push his vision through, not pick the least risky option, which is why the good ones aren't run by committee.
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Businesses need one man to push his vision through, not pick the least risky option, which is why the good ones aren't run by committee.
Nope. Business leaders need informed opinions of experts throughout the organization. The mythology says SJobs decided. Reality shows that when he succeeded he had experts behind him. The visionary Jobs absolutely needed the engineer Wozniak to restrain him at times.
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No, the facts show that.
"Reality shows that when he succeeded he had experts behind him"
Yes, Wozniak was the genius behind him. But Jobs decided. And not a committee.
Just as Musk decides and Bezos decides etc etc etc
Successful firms are run by individuals with a vison, not by committees picking the least risky option.
Jobs 1.0 fail, Jobs 2.0 learned from mistakes (Score:2)
Yes, Wozniak was the genius behind him. But Jobs decided.
No, at time Wozniak said "no". Throughout the Apple II design Jobs ws occasionally overruled. He did not have a truly free hand until the Mac and the Mac was a failure during the entire time Jobs was in charge of the Mac. The Apple II paid the bills at Apple long into the Macs early life. It was not until Jobs was ousted and other started making decisions that the Mac became successful. And guess what, some of those reversals of Jobs' decision took the design back into a Wozniak sort of direction.
Just as Musk decides and Bezos decides etc etc etc
They decid
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"...which is why the good ones aren't run by committee."
or perhaps that the "good ones" are determined through hindsight analysis in combination with idol worship. Also for every good business allegedly made "good" by "one man" there are plenty that are the opposite, and "group decisions" and "committees" are not the same.
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That must be it.
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Well, Woz had the brilliance. Jobs had some technical know how but his chief contribution was the big picture level, the management, selling, hyping, and so forth. Woz was the guy though that made it work. Now Jobs is important of course, without Jobs Apple might have ended up as just microcomputer company like Commodore, but without Woz there would have been nothing at all.
I'm still surprised that on Slashdot, a place for nerds, the techie of the team is usually given second billing and the front man hy
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I wish I could mod this up
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Except when they don't... Can you say 2016 election?
I knew y could
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Re: Groups make better decisions, S Jobs shows tha (Score:2)
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Actually you got it backwards (Score:2)
Jobs genius was in removing unnecessary choices that made computers hard to use. Perhaps you are too young to recall just how awful dos and pc computers were. There where too many incompatible ways to do anything. Some menu functions could only be accessed by the right Mouse button, some by the left and some by menu. Every program was different and some windows had their own menus Some used shard menus. When you plugged in any device you had to figure out which interrupts to assign to it, every mix
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Perhaps you are too old to recall just how awful Apple dos was.
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Yes, Jobs wanted the one-size-fits all approach. This caused problems with the NeXT, which while looking slightly nicer than the competition ended up not being liked by institutions because they weren't customizable, you were forced with just one printer with a clumsy connection, there weren't low-end versus high-end models, etc. Being only 4 scale gray was ok, but the competition had color on the high end, or higher resolution black and white. The NeXT also used a non-standard form factor of the NuBUS mea
Blinking cursor (Score:3)
Watch your language! It may be annoying, but there are less vulgar ways of describing the cursor.
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(*)"Blinking position idicator"
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in a only slightly related tangent, the cursor was known as "Positionsblinkanzeiger(*)" in old German documentation
So basically the 2nd language of Charlemagne [wikipedia.org], right ? Didn't remember him as much of a programmer though. Well, he did formalize a font type, the Caroligian Minuscule [wikipedia.org], with the UTF consortium because he couldn't stand the Uncial.
Re: Blinking cursor (Score:2)
I miss you ... (Score:2)
... blinking cursor. Mouse cursors can be very hard to find nowadays, and I have already doubled mine in size.
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For me it's the "press Ctrl to find cursor", I have 3 monitors and sometimes press ctrl 3 or 4 times to find my cursor :)
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Run xeyes.
Zoom cursor ~blink, blink (Score:2)
Around 1993 my company bought a spare Apple server used with 21” monitor. As a NeXT dev it was helping develop MacOS X apps. But we kept losing sight of the cursor. Om such a large view area monitor the small blinking cursor was not enough cue to see.
A submitted suggestion/Bug logged to Apple met “crickets”.
Over a decade later Apple released it “Zoom” cursor that would blowup like a balloon for you to find. Already AAPL had ossified.
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Ah yes, all those famous 1993 MacOS X apps written by spare Apple servers that were NeXT devs. If only Steve Jobs had invented the 21" monitor earlier your prescient insights might not have been neglected.
Funny how I've always been at the forefront of the largest possible monitor(s) attainable, yet I've never had a problem seeing a cursor even now in my old age. Perhaps it is merely that Mac and NeXT did a poor job with it.
Web "designers" take note (Score:2)
"He said there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if, when you're on a web page and you're told to click something, there was some kind of visual marker indicating you where to click? Or how, when you're reading a web page there is almost no difference between the text and clickable link, something could be come up with to make that difference more pronounced?
If only there was something all these "designers" could do to make things easi
NO NO NO (Score:1)
It could have never been the computer systems used by the navy in the 50's had a long persistence screen that was refreshed every second or so, this one guy "invented" the blinking cursor in the almost 70's and somehow we ran into the weeds talking about steve dickhead jobs
Steve Jobs... (Score:2)
...well, it may be a myth, but sometimes he does sound like a deranged moron. I teach some 'advanced' programming courses. But there are people in them (with years of programming experience I must say) that when they mistype 'keyworrd', will grab the mouse, click after the second 'r', press Backspace, grab the mouse again and click after the 'd'. It drives me insane.
Younger readers would be puzzled by this (Score:2)
"Jobs attempted and failed to remove these keys" (Score:2)
I do wonder how true this is. Apparently Steve Jobs never "did code" - but surely, as an engineer "ideas guy", he must have known how absurd it would be to switch focus from a keyboard to a mouse, in terms of productivity
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It's not a joke - the original Mac keyboards didn't have arrow keys! It's very much a Steve Jobs thing to be a purist about things like this. He considered the mouse to be the more modern, superior way to point at things, and therefore the only way one should point at things. The idea of only doing things one way was (is?) a big part of the whole Apple design philosophy.
The "extended keyboard" came out a few years later, with the pretense that the cursor keys were added for better compatibility in MS-DOS em
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There's not much accuracy in what you've said.
The Mac Plus (1986) had arrow keys on its standard (non-extended) keyboard, even if they were oddly arranged in a 'L' shape. This was long, long before Mac-based MS-DOS emulation was a twinkle in anyone's eye, and years before the Extended Keyboards were released. Every Mac keyboard after has had arrow keys.
And the impulse to leave the keys off the original Mac keyboards was, yes, to encourage users to use the mouse; but it was also to require developers to re-t
Much, Much more to a blinking cursor (Score:2)