Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Computer Cursors

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guests Robert Brockway and Seanbaby explore why computer cursors are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Computer cursors. Known for being arrows. Famous for being lions blinking. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why computer cursors are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my wonderful co-host Katie Golden. Katie hello. Yes

Katie Golden That's me Suddenly I'm only 99% sure it's you. That's fun It is I the one known as Katie Golden Hmm

Suspicious I like it. I trust her The one known as Katie Golden. Hmm. Suspicious. I like it. I trust her. Voted most trustworthy, Katie. I feel like I'm going to be on a rooftop asking you and a lookalike questions about Garfield to figure out who's the real one and who's the imposter. But that's cool. That's great.

And we are so glad to be joined by pals of ours and returning guests. I hope folks know them from the best comedy website on the internet. It's 1-900-HOT-TOG. And only. And increasingly only. And they're just wonderful all around. Please give it up for Robert Brockway and Sean Baby. Hey, guys.

Hello. Hi. Thank you. It's great to be back. Thanks for having us on to derail your podcast again. Yes. It's always a joy. We mix so well with the smart kids, me and Brockway. You do.

I feel you do. And I'm so glad you all could be on this topic topic too. It was suggested one many, many years. He's bragging much. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. What is there to say? I like the way it blinks. I like... Google Docs recently added a little frustrating thing to the computer cursor. I like a little blinking underscore. And Google Docs added an insert-y little vertical line that frustrates me. So I guess I'm a purist. I like a traditional...

It's the kind of thing you don't notice until it's changed. And then you're like, okay, I hate this thing. I liked the old one. I thought the vertical line was the default. Are we... Oh, this is a civil war is what we're doing. I see how it is. I think that's what's happening here.

Yeah. Are you guys fond of- East Coast versus West Coast. Do you like hand or triangle? Triangle. Ooh, triangle. Yeah, I also like the triangle, but I think it's because we had PCs growing up. I got a Mac later on in life and maybe I have to grow up with it.

I like the Diablo gauntlet. That's a good one. That's a nice choice. That's my special relationship with cursors. Like, I remember probably only my generation, we all had custom cursors. That was like the thing to do. Yeah. Like, only people roughly in our generation did that because that died out just like custom ringtones are just gone.

Like, you're a nerd if you have one now i remember doing one where it had like a tracer effect so you could move the cursor around and there was a little like like echo of the cursor you could tell your friends like this is what it's like being high and they'd be like whoa because they don't know you know what's funny is i realized halfway into talking, seeing your faces, that I was talking about like the little blinking cursor where you type and you're talking about like a mouse pointer. Because I always called that thing a mouse pointer. Yeah.

And that's a good thing. Our topic today is primarily those two things. It's both the text cursor in line of text and then the mouse pointer that people do call cursors as well like a mouse cursor they're both i see well then i'm with katie at this full diablo gauntlet yeah i liked uh i once changed all of the cursors to little pixelated middle fingers in my computer lab at school and the teacher just the teacher was looking around like there might be a warlock in the room. He was like, what the f*** is happening? Hey, Robert. What?

Robert. Nice. Good job. Nice. Nice. Nice. If I was really cool, would have been a penis.

A penis with sort of a, like, physics effect. Sparkles. Just flopping around as you move it. Yeah, with sparkles. Sparkle trailer.

I feel like for certain kids, especially ones who would get into the internet, those school computer labs were like a prank speed run test or something. Like I knew a kid who would try to put the G.I. Joe dub videos on all of the computers in a row and try to have them all going at the same time, you know? The most messed with teacher. The most put upon teacher. And that bit where we clarified that this is really two kinds of cursors. you know? Yeah. The most messed with teacher, the most put upon teacher. Well, and that, uh, that bit where we clarified that this is really two kinds of cursors. That's kind of our first number.

So let's get into the set of fascinating numbers and statistics about this topic. And that's in a segment called one stat to rule them all. One stat to find them. One stat to math them all. And in the darkness, combine them. Yay. Very nice. Yeah. Great job, Katie. That name was submitted by Trevor Galvin. Thank you, Trevor. We have a new name every week. Please make him as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through

Discord or a SIFPOT at gmail.com. Are we doing stat songs now? They're usually songs. And that one was a Lord of the Rings-y quote that I thought was cool. Okay. Because if we're doing songs, I might have something. Oh, okay. Do it. Go for it.

Yeah. Katie Colton's on the move. Thunder stats are loose. Feel the Alex feeling more. Thunderats are loose. Feel the Alex feeling more. Thunderstats are loose. Thunder, thunder, thunder, thunderstats! Thunder, thunder,

thunder, thunderstats! Next time I get a negative or weird comment on one of my TikTok videos, I'm going to tell them to feel the Alex feel it more. That's going to be my feedback for them. Just don't tell that to your doctor. Well, I mean, I want a thorough exam.

So, you know. Sean, that was awesome. Thank you. And also, I don't know if I plugged the podcast, The Dog Zone 9000, which is Sean and Robert's podcast and has the greatest theme music and podcasting. It's so good every time. I never skip it to this day. Yeah. That's our buddy Zach Kuntz from the Oral Knots.

Yes. Zach Kuntz, Oral Knots. Really great. And first number this week, like we said, because our topic is two main forms of a computer cursor. There's the blinking indicator in text or the pointer or mouse cursor that's wherever the blinking indicator in text or the pointer or mouse cursor that's wherever the user moves it. They're both called cursors because they broadly do the same thing. There's something that a human can look at to see what location on a screen will receive their input. Very valuable. Yeah. And the other thing is that those two kinds are not a comprehensive list of all the kinds. One key source this week is an amazing piece for Inverse Magazine.

It's by journalist Sarah Wells. And she cites a longtime Apple engineer named Andy Hertzfeld who talks about another popular cursor right now. It's called an animated collection box. And the nickname for that is marching ants. That's whenever you click and drag to select an area and then the dashed line around what you've selected is usually moving a little bit this can be in media editing software or in augmented reality programs but that's a form of cursor like it's telling you your next input will impact this that's that's what cursors do

it would have been cuter if it was like a little group of ants that drag your thing over to the other part of the screen and go like, boy, is this JPEG heavy. If this was 1996, you could change your computer lab's computer to do that. And your computer teacher would hate you so much. You could fill an entire computer with ants in the 90s. I did that all the time. Bees, I often filled computers with bees, unrelated to what we're talking about, but fun surprise. They like structure, you know? Yeah. Social insects. Yeah. And then another number here is four, because according to the official support instructions from Apple, four is how many of your body parts can operate a pointing cursor on the Apple Vision Pro headset. Okay, wait, let me guess.

Yeah. Okay. Eyeballs. Yeah. Hand. Finger, yes. Hips. Oh, nope. Uh, hips. Oh, nope.

Yeah, hips. For sure. Knee. Elbow. Back of the knee. The little place in the back of the knee. Has anyone said butthole? Butthole?

Did anyone say butthole? Can I gyrate towards where I want the cursor to go? Right. Like the Shakira edition, right? Yes. Like then you can navigate the World Wide Web that way. One of them's elbow for sure. You can elbow drop a cursor and like that lets you know, that lets the computer know you really mean it.

Like when you're really trying to click on something, like the computer stalls or it hangs, you give it the old macho man Randy Savage from the top rope. That'll shut down the program. Yeah. That's like all that for. Yeah. That'll shut down the program. Yeah. That's like all that for.

Yeah. I want that. I want that Elon Musk brain chip so I can control the cursor with my mind. And so I can look up symptoms of sepsis with my mind. I want it so I can die like a monkey. Katie, Katie, no joke. That's the bonus show is Elon Musk's whole thing. Oh, God. We'll get into it on the bonus.

A pile of dead monkeys. Okay, so have fun now while we can is what you're saying. Get all of our fun in now. Look, if you want regular cool stuff, it's free. If you want to pay a little bit, we bring you the piles of dead monkeys. I should say there's also another different story in the bonus too. So there's also a kind of happier thing. So there's a lot going on. When the Apple vision pro you can operate it with your head, wrist, finger, or eyes. All of these can act as a pointer inside of the

headset of this new, very popular AR VR kind of headset. Cool. Oh, okay. I get it. Yeah. That's how my wife controls me. And you're telling me, hold on. You're telling me, I haven't used it yet, but you're telling me if I do like a full karate kid snap kick, that won't do anything. That won't move the cursor at all. I guess it depends what your head and eyes do in particular, or wrist or finger, all four. four you know it depends on your movements it's gonna do something rockaway speaks only in finishing moves that's what he's saying you have written my favorite recent thing involving a person doing karate so i trust it yeah that's great i don't even know which thing you're talking about. Yeah, that could be so many things. Imagine how much cardio we could get in if we could like, you had to use certain like moves to send an email.

Yeah. Be a really good fitness device. And God, that thing would get so sweaty. Yeah, let's all learn the combos for I hope this finds you well. All thrusting. Eight thrusts. You have to do 10 jumping jacks if you want to say no worries if not. But yeah, so those are the numbers for categorizing cursors. You know, as we just make new software or new hardware, we often come up with a new cursor.

There's a lot of things in video games where you're just moving a highlighted thing from square to square, like selecting a character or selecting a level. There's all sorts of different cursors across human technology. The next number here is March 2023. March 2023 is when the English Premier League, which is a soccer league, they held a Twitter sweepstakes giveaway for the prize of an automated mouse mover. Is it just like, is it just a little guy? Like what? Is it just like a child? Oh, it's a monkey. It's a monkey.

I get it. A monkey's a good price. So they made a promo video for this and everything, which depicted a lady in a Manchester City soccer jersey enjoying popcorn with their feet up. While this sort of little platform shaped device with a little button in the middle and the button had an English Premier League logo. in the middle and the button had an English Premier League logo. You put your mouse on top of that and then the little button shaped object moves your mouse around from point to point without you doing anything. How do you control it? Like, how do you tell it where to go?

Because otherwise it's going to go on to those websites. Robot pornography. You're just along for the ride. Or robot soccer. It likes soccer. You could combine the two. Yeah, it's always up. I already have. Consider it done.

Yeah, this was a promo they did in particular because in the United States, English Premier League games tend to be on during our afternoon, especially weekday afternoons some of the time. And so it was a lighthearted pitch for the pretty dystopian real thing where a lot of people who work remotely, especially since the COVID pandemic started, are under surveillance from their employers. They're using some kind of software to detect their cursor moving or not moving

and then decide based on that whether they are working when they say they are working. And so the lighthearted pitch was, we'll help you skip work to watch Manchester City play Arsenal. Oh, okay. They sent us all snitch monkeys that observe our every move and report back to HQ. It's the more elegant solution. Right. Maximum Fun sent us snitch monkeys to make sure we're making the podcast.

They don't just see it come out every week. Speaking of which, when you donate, you provide one snitch monkey with a cute little hat and a badge. And yeah, this has kind of been, especially since the year 2020, the weirdest evolution of what cursors mean for us. They're not just what we're using to do stuff, but the software existed before the pandemic and then many companies got into it. It's a way of basically not trusting employees and using the monitoring of the cursor to say, when you're in your house during the weekday, are you doing work for us or not? You could also be working by thinking or something, but no, they want to see your cursor move. Sure. Question about that. Why don't they just use whether you provide work to see if you do work, right? So if it's like, can you write up this thing? And then it's like, well, the week's over. Did you write up that thing?

And you're like, yes. Is that not proof that you did work? You're going to change everything. A job well done feels good, but you know what feels better is tricking monitoring software i would spend all my work day figuring out how to trick that stupid cursor sensor and i would just be so satisfied with my day drinking bird with rubber bands done it free remember when they gave us uh and at that unnamed company when they gave us all um the like uh fitbits to like track our steps as part of our health insurance plan part of our health insurance um i mean it's like you can just put it on a roomba or a overhead fan tie it to a Roomba or an overhead fan.

Tie it to a cat. Yeah, put it on your dog and toss a sausage. It's pretty easy to game that system. It looks like you walked 17 miles today and you killed eight birds. This is incredible. Your premiums are dropping. Yeah, and it is such a way technology can flip, like pretty much all cursors before this served the user. And then thanks to many leaps and networking of technology and interconnectedness of it and software development, they found a way

for it to be something that kind of oppresses the user. So it's really weird. And there's also a lot of things you can find online of people rigging custom gadgets or even just like putting together stuff in their house, like a baby cradle that rocks so that it, in a Ferris Bueller way, moves their mouse back and forth and solves that for them. Yeah. Yeah. We cracked this in the 80s. Laser pointer cat.

Enough said. Yeah. All cat-based solutions. That Laser pointer cat. Enough said. Yeah. All cat-based solutions. That's what we're offering here. Yeah. I've already trained my cat to figure out Excel spreadsheets now just to move the mouse. And that's already in a cat's wheelhouse. You know what?

You get a slippery enough cat, you can keep that snitch monkey busy. Right. They hate cats cats if he catches it it's all over but you got to train that cat well you got to get a real lively one you can turn the snitch monkey and cat against each other so they're too busy fighting each other to realize that you're truly the one pulling the the strings yeah you're the enemy they should be uniting against yes alex what's the show about you know we we have a pretty elegant segue on the topic of running and it brings us into takeaway number one planned at all

the name for a computer cursor comes from the era of slide rules and from Latin. I thought it was because like when you have a program and it crashes and you jiggle your cursor around because you're cursing, you know, like you're going dag nab it. Dag nab it. PowerPoint. Dag nabbed PowerPoint. Right. Cussing it out. Yeah.

I like it. Yeah. Gosh darn it. Butts upon butts. Only, cussing it out. Yeah, I like it. Gosh darn it. Butts upon butts. Only Elmer Fudd curses aloud. Yeah, there is an interesting analog origin for this name. Part of it is that cursor is the Latin word for a runner or for an errant boy, like someone running around physically. And then that name makes sense if you have used a

slide rule before. So my little cursor is like I'm sending the computer running over here as my little errand boy. That does rephrase things like I'm a lord, like I'm a fancy little lord, and I love it. That feels nice. Yeah. And the big source here is web resources from the math department of the University of Utah. They have a bunch of wonderful slide rule stuff. And slide rules were a form of analog computing. It was an object that you could use to do like the verb compute, like add up numbers and do mathematics. Computers used to be people who computed things and like would also actually turn blue when they died, which is an interesting connection.

Right, like someone lost at an Arctic base or windows in the 1990s, very similar. Right, exactly. People have used slide rules for a surprisingly long time. There were early versions in the 1600s, but more modern ones and the popularity really got going in the 1800s and well into the 1900s. There are slide rules that astronauts brought on the Apollo missions. This was a very predominant way of doing math. Man, we were beating up kids for using slide rules back in the 90s.

Imagine how hard you were getting beat up for using a slide rule in the 1600s. Just walked on every day. Those bullies had it the best. Oh wait, they would just burn them. That's what the original bullying was. They just folded them into the Catholic Protestant conflict. And also, if anybody does this nerd thing, put them in the line. Yeah, sure. Yeah, the 1900 slide rule, it was sort of a long ruler-shaped item with logarithms and numbers written on it. And then it had a sliding piece that you could slide up and down the ruler-shaped body. And it made a whoop-boop sound.

The tin whistle era of mathematics, yeah. Depending on where your pants were at the time. Hold on, I hear a nerd whistle. Right, of pitchforks and torches, yeah. They're close. And so that sliding element is why the whole thing is called a slide rule. But also they named that piece of it a cursor. is called a slide rule, but also they named that piece of it a cursor. It's a little sort of translucent or plastic piece that moves up and down the slide. And because it goes back and

forth like that very quickly, it reminded people of a runner on a racetrack or a race course. And so then they selected this Latin word for a runner. So that's where we get it. It's from before an electronic or digital computer. And it was the closest anyone who used a slide ruler got to athletics. Dunking on them today. Got them. Got those nerds. I sure got those nerds. Those nerds who are not, not I.

Yeah, I exclusively understood slide rules as a nerd prop when I was a kid, but they were everywhere and they're where we get this name. Like then people building the computer I'm used to applied it later. And then as far as like the regular computer cursors, how did we get each of the two main kinds? Let's start with the one that is for text with takeaway number two. A little known Minnesota engineer patented and might have invented the blinking text cursor. Huh. Like this might be one of the least heralded people in the history of technology. And he's going to stay that way.

We're not going to say a single nice thing about him. Moving on. Don't say the name. Don't say the name. Yeah, it's an interesting guy. I'm going to say his name. His name is Charles Kiesling. We have solid information that he existed and probably was involved in the early development of this, but he so unheralded he's kind of hard to research too it's really weird i love i love we

have solid information that he existed he lived i swear to god he lived i can prove it we found droppings keesling droppings found. You can track the white fox. You sent us a picture of this gentleman, and he had a little sailor hat. Yeah, so cute. I would have placed this man anywhere between 11 and 45 years old. Maybe it's the sailor hat. There's something that makes it impossible to age a person.

Or a duck. You see a duck in a sailor hat, you're like, that's an 80-year-old duck? A newborn duck? I can't tell. I swore to God this Navy uniform was Photoshopped on. I don't know why. It doesn't look real. He looks like a more handsome Mr. Bean.

Yeah, he really does. He looks like a hot Mr. Bean. Yes. Hotter. Hot, hotter, yes. Right. If he was a heroic U.S. Navy sail Hotter. Hot, hotter. Yeah. Right. If he was a heroic U.S. Navy sailor, just kind of had it going on. Yeah.

He's a bilf. Who made no impression on anybody in history. Yeah, we, I sent you guys that picture of him because it's the only picture we have is from his U.S. Navy service in the Korean War. The other evidence of his existence are a real United States patent for a blinking text cursor filed in 1967, and then a real newspaper obituary in the Star Tribune newspaper in 2014. That's the big newspaper in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Like unless there was a really elaborate fraud, this guy existed. So nothing Navy cursor death. That's what I feel a little bit guilty for calling him a bill.

Is that disrespectful? I mean it with all due respect. I felt it. I felt it. I loved it. I can't imagine him taking offense to that. Right. Right.

And then the the other big source for this is that piece for Inverse Magazine by Sarah Wells, also a piece for Hackaday.com by Al Williams. They talk about how until the mid-1960s, late 1960s, if you were using one of those computers where it's just text on a screen, it could be really difficult, especially if you're not experienced with that kind of machine, because it's hard to tell where you last did your input. You have to do a lot of remembering. There's not a cursor to show you. It's really weird.

Frustrating. Yeah. I'm so used to that just being a crutch for how I type things, is there's a blinking text cursor where I typed last. I don't have to remember that like I'm playing chess blindfolded or something. I don't want to do that. It was more of an adventure though. You got to give them that. It was thrilling.

I just. Never knowing what you were going to type. If I get lost on the page, I just, you know, do the whole keyboard slap, slap down some random, random entries. That's my writing process too. It has been for many years. Yeah. And apparently one acute example of this

is that in the early 1960s, people at Oxford tried to use teletype machines to type up the Oxford English Dictionary. And these lexicographers who are not used to teletypes or machines like that really struggled to not just bleed the words into the code. Apparently the screens were really dim. It was hard to read green text on a black field. And so it was a total mess. And there are people who were impacted by the lack of a text cursor in that era. It saved lives.

It prevented so much destruction in the nerd wars as the lexicographers turned against the computer nerds over this slight. Yeah, those old screens were like unwashed fish tanks full of random letters. Yes. Yeah, it's like trying to squint into that orb that Saruman uses to see other parts of Middle Earth or something. Like it's not cool as a way of looking at anything. The oar thinks. That was the original cursor. You'd wait for the hobbit to put on the ring.

Right. And then see what you were typing. You'd make a hobbit run around and hold up a triangle to show you where you were typing. aware you were typing. And so then Charles Kiesling, he filed a 1967 US patent. The title is Blinking Cursor for Cathode Ray Tube Display. And this was also something he did for his company. He didn't own it personally. He was working for the Sperry Rand Corporation, which is a tech company that eventually became Unisys. It has basically not been reported on or talked about until a couple of years ago. He just kind of lived his life, worked at the company, didn't really make money from

this. And it's not totally for certain he even invented it. Like he might have known somebody else who came up with it and been the first to patent it. But given that he didn't make any money or seek any glory, he probably just quietly came up with it and filed a patent and moved on. You're saying there could have been an even hotter Mr. Bean who invented this? Ba-ba-boom.

It sounds like he's only had a legacy for, what, seven minutes now. You're like, here's this guy. No one knows about him. In fact, he might not have done it. Boom. Yeah. We're starting to think he probably didn't even do it you know what screw this guy his hotness is just too unbelievable you know yeah who can trust it right he'll always have

if he wanted to be remembered by history he should have jumped ship done that corporate espionage and fled with like all of his careful research papers like a bond movie but all about the cursor it's a blinking vertical line damn you it's gonna change everything we can't let the russians get hold of it no he could he could get a lot of money for taking that information to russia where it's like the cursor goes on and then the cursor goes off. Duh, duh. My God. Makes sense now. Bond comes in with just gas. Capitalists with your blinking.

Puts him on a rocket bobsled back over the border. See, that's how you do it, nerd. This is why history doesn't remember you. Yeah. Yeah, one of the other fragments of information we have about Charles Kiesling is a comment on a page on Stack Exchange, which is a discussion website for tech stuff. And it's someone claiming to be his son. It just probably is his son, because why would you bother to lie? You're not even worth pretending that you're somebody's dad.

And his apparent son shared this story, quote, I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor. He said there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up a code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the cathode ray tube, end quote. God, that guy's got away with words. That's his kid. That's his kid. Yeah.

He's got the same panache, which is to say doesn't. Yeah. And then like, according to his obit, he lived most of his life in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, veteran of the Korean War, active in his VFW hall. Like he was just a guy and partly because it was work for hire, didn't at all try to hold on to this idea. We have a bunch of examples of early computers or workstations that had a blinking cursor by the early 1970s, because this was just a really good idea and pretty simple to code even for the technology of that time. Right. So he was just some guy who had a normal, happy life without getting famous and, you

know, going to a bunch of parties and doing drugs. What a sad story. God, miserable. If he was alive today, he would probably have the patent worked out so that every time it blinked, he would get seven cents. Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. It'd make that noise. It sounds like a curse.

It sounds like it quickly turns into a curse where you're just drowning under money. Pennies filling your life. Help. I like how you think that with a patent, money just kind of falls out of the sky. You stand at the bottom of the Scrooge vault and it falls down on you. You can't get out of the way. You stand at the bottom of the Scrooge vault and it falls down on you.

You can't get out of the way fast enough. I love that story. It seems to be a guy who just gave everybody this good idea with no friction, no royalties, hangups. And I have used his idea most of the days of my life. And so I have probably most people listening to this. It's cool.

And he did it with a smile. I don't know that, but I'm saying that. I'm looking at his picture. He didn't. With a serious pensive expression. And that's two takeaways and our numbers. We have two more whole takeaways about more cursors, especially for mousing, and we'll hit them after a short break. See you right after. Folks, I want you to know something. This podcast exists for two reasons.

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no running in the halls. And we are back with takeaway number three about cursors. The first mouse cursor was called a bug and was just one piece of the most famous tech demo of all time was it a was it a real bug did they mean it like it's a mistake like oh i don't know what's

happening here yeah was it a mistake or like a little beetle that they dragged around it's really weird they they called it a bug even though the computer error meaning of bug already existed and was already being passed around. But because of the physical look of it and how it moves, an engineer named Douglas Engelbart called it a bug when he did the most famous demo in tech history in December 1968. That's how you build a legacy, Charles Kiesling. You see that? Do an Engelbart. He should have called it an Engelbart. He'd probably try and they're like, dude, stop bugging me. Wait a second! Bugging me?

Now drag your Engelbart over to drive. Shout out to my fellow, like, Central European last name people. What a field of names. They sound so funny in so many contexts. Engelbarting? Great. Love it. I like them. I like the way they come out of my mouth. It's a good name. Yeah. And yeah, the main source here, it's a book. It's called

1968, Today's Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution, and Change. It's edited by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and Mark Aronson. And then the piece we're citing is written by Mark Aronson. This is a story where there is one demo on December 8th, 1968, where an engineer named Douglas Engelbart and a couple of colleagues basically templated all of computing into today like they they demonstrated and did a prototype of everything and it's really neat it's really cool yeah whatever you just made all of computing yeah it's fine just wrote it up i had it needs something it needs something if this was halt and catch fire like somebody's daughter would get plowed and somebody would

fall out a window. Like, I don't know. Spice it up. The demo was like overly calm. This guy Engelbert, his vision was the following. I would have pooped my pants. If someone was like, if I had never seen a computer and someone was like, here's a computer, I would lose it.

I'd be foaming at the mouth i'd be calling him a demon be trying to exercise him yeah let's bully this nerd by hurting it was probably the size of a bus with like paper punch cards i bet like we're picturing a computer but this was probably like a giant warring machine that makes it so much more intimidating i would double burn him for that you you brought an angry sentient locomotive into my into my life you're gonna pay so there were already there were already computers at this point but they were sort of like laying the groundwork for like personal computers or what what was sort of the innovation happening here? Yeah. Great question. Like here's,

here's a brief summary of what they demonstrated in one 90 minute demo. And this is Mark Aronson describing it quote, Engelbart had shown the mouse linked files, file sharing, split screen messaging, and the internet end quote. How did they invented all of that? Now, hang on. How did they invent all of that? Now, hang on.

How did they know about the internet? Yeah, they did some local networking of computers, but also part of the demonstration was basically Google Maps. It was a thing of asking a database questions about your route between your office and home for dry cleaning and other just things you want to do on the way and then maybe the most mind-blowing part was the mouse and the cursor because this was the first demonstration of a computer mouse douglas engelbart and a colleague had patented the mouse one year before they came up with it. Did they call it a mouse because it looks kind of like a mouse?

Mm-hmm. So, interestingly, Engelbart didn't like that name. During the demo, he told people, quote, I don't know why we call it a mouse. Could we call it an Engelbart instead? Yeah. Let's call it an Engelbart. Its name will not stick on anything. Well, listen, this part's the angle, and then on the screen is the bart.

You use the angle to move the BART. Right. Now every time someone uses a computer, they'll have to touch angle BART. Finally. Finally. It's all coming up angle BART. Gotta feel up angle BART if you want to open your files. Their patent for a mouse called it the following name, an XY

position indicator for a display system. Catchy. That rocks. Now simply use your XY indicator for your display system. Shut up, Engelbart. It's almost too fun, yeah. And so, like, other people on his team called it a mouse, and that's

stuck, and no one's top that. Go invent the internet, nerd. And then this demo, they had what their computer was doing on a big screen. And apparently the most mind blowing part was seeing Engelbart sit at a computer and use this mouse. Because no one had ever seen a computer do more than just receive numbers and typing of some characters. It looked like the computer was in harmony with his mind because they saw the cursor on the screen moving around all sorts of places as he chose. Technomancer. Engelbart, you bit wizard.

Yeah, it seemed like a leap a hundred years into the future. Like, how did he do this? You need a chill guy like that to present technology like that. Because if that was me, as soon as somebody was like, it's like you're linked to the computer with your mind, I would have turned and said, I am. Right? Yeah, I would have planted someone in the crowd and had their head explode. Right? This is your chance.

This is your chance to become a god. The reason Engelbart wanted to call a cursor a bug is that with the graphics of the time and especially in this big screen projection, the cursor just looked like a little black smudge. It didn't look like an arrow yet. That was kind of too advanced to do.

And because of the look and also because of how it moved, you know, erratically and all over, it reminded them of like a fly. So they called it a bug, even though the word bug was already a tech word for something going wrong. Why not just call it a fly, man? This is our new invention, the mistake. Right.

We regret it and we are sorry. We take it back. Yeah. And because of like slide rule culture and because of the almost simultaneous development of a text cursor, because this demo is 1968. Kiesling's text cursor patent is 1967. Like then the name cursor kind of bleeds over to this mouse cursor. It also gets called a pointer because of an arrow or a hand shape it gets drawn as and because of what it does. But that's where we get the name applied to it later.

I love the phrase slide rule culture. Yeah. As though they're all sipping port at a fancy party with the slide rule in one hand. I say. Whoop whoop. I don't believe you've ever slide ruled in your life and he slaps him in the face with a slide rule like it's a glove your challenge is accepted slides at dawn name five slide rulers

yeah and and yeah and then this demo was so advanced they they had kind of too many discoveries to share because basically a couple minutes after revealing the mouse and cursor to the world engelbart's editing a dock with it and then a second person at a second computer uses a second mouse to edit the same dock at the same time. It's essentially Google Docs in 1968. But then there's two cursors on the screen, which really freaked people out. It seems also in terms of them like talking about the internet and stuff, which I assume they don't, they didn't call it the internet yet. But like, these were sort of like speculative things of like, hey, this is where the stuff

is going, right? sort of like speculative things of like, hey, this is where the stuff is going, right? Like they didn't actually, or did they like demonstrate some ability to do some kind of internet? Because that's just like a local connection between two computers. Yeah, it's kind of both. It was a lot of things that they said, this is where, this is theories, this is where it should go. And then also Engelbart's team was trying to make computers for everyday people to use. And they could have accepted that Engelbart was really, really stubborn about where he thought technology should go. And he thought it should be for kind of super users and people who almost see it as like an art or a craft getting good at using a computer. Technomancers, just say it. Just say it, Engelbert.

Engelbert's, yeah. And most of his colleagues disagreed and quit and went over to work at companies like Xerox. And then a few years later, 1973, Xerox builds the first early personal computer, which has a mouse and a pointing cursor. And that sets the stage for this Bing tech we all use. Got dunked on because you were too elitist about your computer invention. Beautiful work. How you're into computers, right? Name five computers. Like more so, he said that his ideal user was something he called an intelligence worker. And at one point he told his team he

wanted computer users to learn a set of 50,000 different commands. Like it's some art form that they're all trying to master, like the violin or something. It's like a classic Engelbert move right there. Just gatekeeping computers. Here's a fun fact. My dad actually worked at Xerox in 1973. Really? Yeah. So as a child, I had some early prototype Windows interfaces, like some of the first mouse operating systems. I think they started Sidereal. My dad went off and worked at Sidereal, which anyway, it did not go very well. Apple and IBM took over the entire market and that company collapsed. But-

Sean, that's amazing. Before it was cool, I had a Windows operating system, but it was called something much different. And that's why we call emptying the recycling bin Sean, baby. That's right. They wanted to call it Engelbert. cycling bin, Sean baby. That's right. They wanted to call it Engelbert. That's amazing about Xerox. Cause yeah, I think people don't know that Xerox did a lot of computer pioneering partly because they felt like that was where it was going. And maybe photocopying is not the center of all commerce in the future. And they were right. But like you said, other companies

like Apple and IBM took it over. Apparently in 1979, Xerox held a computing demo attended by Steve Jobs and most of his employees. And then they took notes and did some of that stuff themselves. Break out the crowbars, boys. It's time to bust some kneecaps. This is how human progress works in general. But it's great to just track the escalating ladder of nerds who stole glory from each other over and over. Yeah, because then Microsoft kind of did it to Apple. And that process is a big reason why we have the mouses and cursors we have today is that just

everybody understood how good of an idea Douglas Engelbart had and ran with it. I genuinely sort of miss the DOS era. I don't know if you guys are old enough to remember DOS, but before Windows, you had like, you just took black screen and you had to type around. That's how you traveled around your hard drive and did stuff. And it was such a barrier of entry. Yeah.

And it was, it ran faster. Now it doesn't matter because of our power, but like, it was nice. You had to be so elite just to start it up and like do a thing. And it was nice. Yes. I feel like if we kept it that way, we could have saved a lot of like soft-brained uncles from like reading things that the internet has.

You know, we could have kept a lot of knowledge out of the hands of less media literate. Colloidal. There'd be less of a market for colloidal silver is what you're saying. Yeah, absolutely. There is that tension of how user-friendly or not do we make stuff. And then even some of these key people will have really specific opinions. Like apparently Steve Jobs had a super specific opinion about cursors. He believed that both the text cursor and the mouse cursor are good but you should only control it with a mouse and like click around your text cursor that way and you should not use arrow keys

aka the cursor keys to move that text cursor around he thought that was bad and and not the optimal way setting a bad example for people. The devil's keys. There's a kind of legendary story about him where the writer Walter Isaacson was interviewing Jobs a bunch to write a book about him that became a big hit. And at one of the interviews, Jobs interrupted Isaacson, took out his car keys and pried the arrow keys off of Isaacson's keyboard. Because he was like, I don't like these. These are not good.

Just removed them from the guy's keyboard without permission. Man, I would have. What an Engelbert move. I built him, I can take him back. I would have elbow dropped that guy. Mess with my cursor keys. And with cursors, we have one more takeaway for the main show about, I think, an even more unique tech person. Takeaway number four.

One astounding designer named Susan Kerr created the Mac computer's hand-shaped cursor as part of a vision of technological friendliness and humanity. That's beautiful. Well, she tried. Yeah, that's a pretty dramatic way to describe a little hand. I drew a little hand for humanity. I mean, but can you, like, if we kept the little hand, right? Like, do you think we may have developed a greater sense of humanity and not, like, screamed at people on Twitter so much? Well, and I still, I have a MacBook Pro and I still have the hand cursor in some situations. Like, it changes to that sometimes when I float over something that i can either select oh my god

it does yeah so it's still with us it's but it's like a little it's a little mickey mouse hand it's like a little gloved hand which is so cute yeah looks like looks like you're trying to open a jpeg it's remember it's your errand boy you're you're a fancy little lord and it is your errand boy yeah i send him in his steamboat to go get me things yeah yeah let me just uh download that document for you it would take a lot longer but i would love it if it was just a full animated journey of like a little butler that you sent across as you dragged it across the screen he hops in a steamboat hops in a train gets abused by like a green grocer saves an orphan from. Yeah, the key sources here are the Smithsonian Lemel Center for the Study of Invention and

Innovation, also a piece by Kurt Kolstad for the website of 99% Invisible, which is an amazing show. They talk about Susan Kerr, who is a legend in design, and I think totally unknown to the rest of the world. She's celebrated as, quote, the woman who gave the Macintosh a smile because of her choices with especially graphic design and icon design, such as cursors. I remember that little guy. I remember that little Macintosh computer's little guy. Yeah, she drew that. Yeah, like specifically. Little guy. I like that little guy. She really brought a lot of important and different ideas to all of tech, starting with Apple, partly because she never really set out to work in tech. She was a fine artist, and she was in the Bay Area in the 1980s working as a sculptor. Yeah, she looks like she can party. You sent me that picture of her. It's the only computer person I've seen that I'm like, all right, she can party.

Right. She's so cool. Yeah, we'll have pictures. She's very much not an Engelbert. Yeah, that's not an Engelbert. Yeah. And she also, just by being cool, had friends. And she had gone to high school with Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld, one of the early employees. And in 1982, when Apple was working on the Macintosh computer that would come out in 84, Hertzfeld contacted Susan Kerr and said, we're looking for somebody for like a short-term graphic design job. Would you be interested? And she was interested and also had not done any of that in particular fonts. She went to the Palo Alto, California public library, read as much as she could about typography because that was the first thing they wanted was some fonts. And she also talked to Hertzfeld about pixel art, which she had not done. And he suggested you should just go out and get a notebook of graph paper with whatever

the smallest gauge of graph lines is. And then you can test ideas in that, just filling in the squares. And in a later interview, she said, quote, I didn't have any computer experience, but I had experience in graphic design. Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple. Okay, so she was qualified. And so she was like weirdly perfect for inventing this job, even though no one did it. Yeah, you know what's interesting is I visited Pompeii and they had these mosaics where if you stand far enough away, they actually kind of look like paintings. Because these were highly detailed with tiny little like, you know, mosaic pixels.

And then you go up close and it's like a mosaic. And it's like, yeah, we kind of pixels. And then you go up close and it's like a mosaic. And it's like, yeah, we kind of like invented pixel art in Pompeii. And then everyone blew up. So I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm just saying maybe we're all gonna die in a volcano if we get too good at computer art. God hates pixel art. Yeah, it's the Tower of Babel. We got too close to the language of heaven, which is pixel art, which is anti-graphics.

Right. The painter George Seurat doing pointillism immediately thrust into a volcano. That's how he died. That was it. Notoriously,

notoriously exploded in the middle of the street. Yeah. French volcano. We've listened to that episode of your show. A French volcano sounds like a sex thing. Sorry, it does. Yeah, it does a number on your Engelbert, I'll tell you that.

Yeah, so Susan Kerr, she spent $2.50 on a basic graph paper notebook, and she used it to sketch so many exciting prototypes of common icons that we use today that the Museum of Modern Art has acquired that notebook since then. It's a historic item in the history of designing how we use computers and icons. How much did your college education cost you guys? Because I spent $250 just dunked on them,

just right over their heads, backflips. A little icon of her doing a tomahawk dunk over Steve Jobs, I guess. Yeah, check out this thing I drew. This one's you. Yeah, and so she did the sort of short-term gig, immediately gets hired to be a key full-time Apple employee. She designed entire font libraries.

She improved all the existing icons. They even just put her in photos and ads for Mac products because she's really cool. Had the right vibe. She's super cool. That was the right move. She's the one who came up with the looping command symbol on Mac keyboards.

It's based on a Scandinavian cross that's used on road signs for points of interest in Scandinavian countries. And then maybe her biggest impact is just humanizing this Mac computer. She did that icon of a smiling Mac. And along with that Mickey Mouse-ish glove hand that your cursor sometimes turns into that made Macs feel friendly. It became a lot of the brand of the whole thing and also convinced a lot of people to try having a computer. Not everybody had a computer yet in the 1980s, but that helped bring people in. On the other hand, Clippy will pop in and call me a sex criminal still six times a day. Very unpleasant. sex criminals still six times a day.

Very unpleasant. It looks like you're trying to be a douchebag. Do you want help with that? Yeah, Clippy. That would be great, Clippy. Oh, wait. You don't need help. Ha ha.

Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Close. I do like the idea that there's like some old timers who are like intimidated by computers. And then but, you know, then you try to give them a piece. And I don't know about this old little square robot. Now, is that a human hand?

Is that a little glove Mickey Mouse hand? Now, I think I'm warming up to this here, robotic overlord. Yeah, and she just went on to seed that perspective across all of tech. Later in the 80s, Apple kicked Steve Jobs out. He starts a company called Next, and they hire Susan Kerr as their creative director. Then she went into business for herself and worked for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Facebook, to name a few. She took a full-time job in the 2010s at Pinterest. And so between all these different direct and indirect influences, she's why anything in tech looks friendly or cute. She's kind of why we have emojis, even though Japanese cell phone companies did a lot of the

groundwork. It's a lot of why the things we look at, like cursors, look the way they do. Is this one person? Diablo Gauntlets. She's the reason we don't get Diablo Gauntlets. Yeah. The cursor could have been like an angry little face. Just a butt. It's the best way to do it.

Just a butt. A butt with a poop coming out of it imagine if that had happened i get yeah i guess the three schools are just a tilted arrow and it turns out it's partly tilted because that was more straight lines it was easier for early pixel graphics but anyway the the three schools are regular arrow cute sus care, and then the entire combined video game designer guy world where it's crazy military arrows. That's it. Right.

And a tiny butt. And of course the butt. Yeah, tiny butt pooping as we have established. That's the future. folks that's the main episode for this week and i want to say an extra thank you to buddies that we're so happy to have on the show again robert brockway and sean baby they're longtime friends collaborators of both me and katie and then they make a truly amazing written comedy website it's called 1-900-HOT-DOG. It is basically the only remaining site where you can read an article that is funny.

Also, if you're looking for like writing from me, I write a column for 1-900-HOT-DOG once per month. So that's on their website once per month. And if you check it out, I hope you enjoy. You know what else is a joy? The outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the name for a computer cursor comes from the era of slide rules and from Latin. Takeaway number two, a little-known Minnesota engineer named Charles Kiesling patented and might have invented the blinking text cursor. Takeaway number three, the first mouse cursor was called a bug

and was just one piece of the most famous tech demo of all time. And takeaway number four, designer Susan Kerr created the Mac computer's hand-shaped cursor as part of her vision of technological friendliness and humanity. We had some numbers in there, too, about the latest Apple Vision Pro, about augmented reality cursors, about the English Premier League trying to help people skip work as a joke, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now.

If you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. We foreshadowed this bonus, but it is two stories. We foreshadowed this bonus, but it is two stories. It's the alleged Neuralink operation of a cursor, and then a more joyful story about the first literal computer bug. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show,

for a library of more than 15 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things. Check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include an amazing piece for Inverse Magazine by journalist Sarah Wells, a book called 1968. Today's authors explore a year of rebellion, revolution, and change, edited by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and by Mark Aronson. Also looked at patent records, looked at the obituary for Charles

Kiesling, Smithsonian resources about Susan Kerr, 99% Invisible website resources about her too. Also lots of different Smithsonian museum records about mice and the other early technological hardware. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hokang, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Robert taped this on the traditional land of the Podunk and Wangunk people. Sean taped this on the traditional land of the Patwin, Muwekma, and Karkin people. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, Robert's location, Sean's location, and many

other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is a numerical topic. Episode 160 is about the topic of WD-40. Fun fact, the recipe of WD-40 is the most closely guarded secret in San Diego, California. So I recommend that episode and its mysteries. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode.

Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly

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