According to a post on a computer science message board from a user purporting to be Kiesling’s son, the inspiration for this invention was simply utility.
“I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor, and it was simple,” 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.
Enter: the computing giants
The blinking cursor as we know it today still wouldn’t make its general public debut for a few decades. Its functionality first appeared on the Apple II in 1977 and was later incorporated in Apple’s undersold younger sister of the infamous Macintosh, the Apple Lisa, in 1983.
Andy Hertzfeld is a retired Apple software engineer who worked on the Macintosh. He says that Apple II’s wink came at the expense of another common computing feature that the machine’s famous designer, Steve Wozniack, chose to ax.
“The original Apple II did not support lowercase letters which is kind of surprising to most people,” Hertzfeld tells Inverse, laughing. “But the designer, Wozniak, made a trade-off that blinking characters were more important than lowercase letters.”
The choice was made simply based on necessity based on the limited memory, or ROM, that chips were capable of at the time, Hertzfeld says, but it nonetheless had a lasting impact.
In the Apple II, this blinking — which could be extended to the cursor as well — was enabled using hardware, Hertzfeld explains. In the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, it was done using system graphics and software. These two systems were both in the perfect position to capitalize on the release of the first commercially popular word processor, WordStar, in 1978.
But Hertzfeld actually first laid his eyes on the blinking cursor years earlier, he says, as a student in the 1970s.
“The first time I saw a blinking cursor was on a video terminal when I was in college,” Hertzfeld says, referring to a screen not unlike our laptops today that displayed your work in real-time. “Video terminals started taking over from the teletypes. Anything blinking is an artifact of video — if you’re just printing [like the teletypes] you can’t blink.”