Unbeknownst to them, engineers were already developing a seemingly innocuous feature that would quietly change computing forever: the blinking cursor. Devoid of the seamless trackpad and mouse control we take for granted today, wordsmiths of the era were instead forced to hack through a digital jungle of their own creation. These were some of the first growing pains of early word processing. Barely able to decipher the mess in front of them, they sought refuge in their printer - only for it to churn out ink smears on flimsy paper.

Staring bleary-eyed into the incredibly small screens of early computer terminals, the lexicographers found themselves lost in a sea of green and black as pieces of unintelligible code merged with stranded locutions. The Oxford English Dictionary is a symbolic vessel of the English language that has persisted for hundreds of years, but constructing a 1960s school edition brought Oxford lexicographers to their knees. The blinking cursor claims a backstory of how intuitive computing can stand the test of time and hold its own in an ever-changing digital environment. In fact, months of research to uncover the origin of this ubiquitous feature reveal that it’s been largely relegated to a dusty, forgotten shelf of computing history. Of course, not everyone's relationship with the blinking cursor is codependent.

It's why and how the words you're reading right now were created. The blinking cursor is not just some 1970s invention of yesteryear - it oriented millions of people in the digital world. When we falter in our prose, the blinking cursor is there to patiently ask “What’s next?” Like a heartbeat or the glowing pulse of a traffic light at midnight, it’s a hypnotic beat that’s all too familiar.įrom Microsoft Word to Google Docs, the blinking cursor is a companion that compels us throughout text documents and text messages and naughty Google searches.

Cursors for mac computer