I was sure the blinking cursor was a staple of the mainframe folks' terminals years, maybe decades before Apple came on the scene, but I looked up some YouTube videos and the DEC VT52 (released 1974-1975) seems to have not had a blinking cursor. Its successor, the iconic VT100 did have a blinking cursor, but wasn't released until 1978.
Maybe later I'll do more research and look up other old terminal models, but I'm going to stop for now.
Also, I guess Apple is a little older than I thought; I always pictured the ubiquitous Apple IIe as a 1980's machine (and I saw some in the wild well into the 1990's). Seeing they were released in the 1970's is pretty interesting.
> “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.”
Herzfeld is mistaken: Wozniak himself says the lack of lowercase had a completely different reason:
So, in the end, the basic reason for no lowercase on the Apple I and Apple II was my own lack of money. Zero checking. Zero savings.
I was sure the blinking cursor was a staple of the mainframe folks' terminals years, maybe decades before Apple came on the scene, but I looked up some YouTube videos and the DEC VT52 (released 1974-1975) seems to have not had a blinking cursor. Its successor, the iconic VT100 did have a blinking cursor, but wasn't released until 1978.
Maybe later I'll do more research and look up other old terminal models, but I'm going to stop for now.
Also, I guess Apple is a little older than I thought; I always pictured the ubiquitous Apple IIe as a 1980's machine (and I saw some in the wild well into the 1990's). Seeing they were released in the 1970's is pretty interesting.
> “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.”
Herzfeld is mistaken: Wozniak himself says the lack of lowercase had a completely different reason:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...The headline is completely wrong, there was no bug fixed. The blinking cursor was an invention, not a bugfix.
Utterly buries the lede. The actual content that explains where the blinking cursor comes from is ~1 paragraph.