Typography

Non-Pocket version, because screw that enshittified plugin gone feral. Give me back Read It Later, you cowards.

The Apple II was one of the first personal computers to integrate a blinking cursor into its systems.

The Apple I also had a blinking cursor. (And would support blinking characters in general, but I think the video hardware as-designed ignores when the CPU tries to use it.)

At first, the cursor was stuck to the bottom of your text document, Haigh says. But the invention of the mouse in 1964 by Douglas Engelbart and the addition of cursor or arrow keys to keyboards made it easier for typists to move through the document with ease.

The history of cursor keys is also a whole thing. I only know about the Apple I via modern emulator nonsense, so when I wrote the only action game on the platform, people with repro hardware couldn't play it. It ran just fine... but the machine has no left or right keys. A quick hack checked for < and > instead.

Did anyone else find that article incredibly disjointed and hard to read?

They never seemed to mention a “bug” or an “existential crisis” either.

“I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor, and it was simple,” Charles “Chuck” 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.

Came for the headline, educated myself about typesetting machines on wikipedia after reading the article. Headline was a bit misleading.