We ignore it in the vast majority of cases, but at the same time it can indicate a failure when it doesn't move or stops blinking. Obviously we're talking about the text cursor, a fundamental resource for knowing where we are on the screen. Where does it come from? How long has it been with us? The history of the text cursor predates MS-DOS and home computers, but thanks to the magic of the Web, today we have a pretty solid idea about its origin…
The intervention of computers in some fields was absolutely revolutionary, but the initial adaptation processes were not free of problems. For example, the art of typography was turned upside down with the first proto-word processors, which had low-resolution screens showing a green sea that was almost impossible to understand. Over time, electronic systems improved their quality, but there was still a need for an effective and intuitive way to insert, edit, and delete text without falling into a maze of characters.
The origin of the blinking text cursor
Fast forward to 1967, when Charles Allan Kiesling, a Korean War veteran and engineer employed by Sperry Rand, filed his application for patent US3531796A, titled “Blinking Cursor for CRT Display”. Kiesling was part of Sperry Rand (later Unisys and other subsidiaries) for 38 years until his retirement in 1993. Only through his son, who posted a brief message on Stack Exchange in early 2014, can we confirm that his goal was pure utility: There was nothing to indicate your position on the screen, and so the blinking cursor became a vital resource for programmers to locate it amid all the chaos of text.
The exposure of the text cursor grew along with that of computers, and in some cases, technical compromises were necessary. Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the Macintosh development team, explained that the Apple II didn't support lowercase letters due to its original memory limits, and that Steve Wozniak valued blinking more. But Woz himself shared a different, much more human version of the events: He was broke at that time and didn't have the money to implement lowercase support properly.
The rest is a matter of “if it isn't broken, don't fix it”: Like the steering wheel of a car, the blinking text cursor works too well to replace it, at least on desktop and laptop computers. It's simple, intuitive, and most importantly, it doesn't get in the way of the user's work.
Source: Inverse
