The blinking cursor is not just some 1970s invention of yesteryear — it oriented millions of people in the digital world. It’s why and how the words you’re reading right now were created.
In an interesting post on Inverse, Sarah Wells does a deep dive into something you probably don’t think about very often: the blinking cursor. You’d assume there wasn’t much to the story. Maybe a terminal manufacturer put a toggle flip-flop on the cursor output, and it caught on. But the true story is much deeper than that.
We were surprised that the father of the blinking cursor was one guy, Charles Kiesling. In a 1967 patent, he described the blinking cursor. An ex-Navy man, Kiesling’s patent names his employer at the time, Sperry Rand, where he’d worked since 1955.
Humans are adept at noticing change, and a blinking cursor draws your eye immediately.
See https://hackaday.com/2022/01/05/blinking-cursor-turns-54-hardly-anyone-notices/
#technology #retrocomputing
Blinking Cursor Turns 54, Hardly Anyone Notices – It’s One Of Those Things We Just Take For Granted Now
