It is a slow, myocardial rhythm.

Like a heartbeat or the glowing pulse of a traffic light at midnight, it’s a hypnotic beat that’s all too familiar.

From Microsoft Word to Google Docs, the blinking cursor is a companion that compels us throughout text documents and text messages and naughty Google searches.

When we falter in our prose, the blinking cursor is there to patiently ask “What’s next?”

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.

Of course, not everyone’s relationship with the blinking cursor is codependent. 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. Perhaps it’s time to change that.

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.

Grandfather of the Google Doc

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.

“Half of it was gobbledygook.”

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. 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.

These were some of the first growing pains of early word processing. 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. Unbeknownst to them, engineers were already developing a seemingly innocuous feature that would quietly change computing forever: the blinking cursor.

Long before words sprung to being from the press of a key, printers had to laboriously move blocks of type around by hand to create works of fiction.Bill Brandt/Picture Post/Getty Images

Paul Luna is a typography historian and emeritus professor at the University of Reading in England. He arrived at Oxford just a few years after their initial struggle with this phototype machine, an early predecessor to the personal computer. For editors used …….

Source: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/blinking-cursor-history