54 years ago, a programmer fixed a bug – and created an existential crisis

Comments (4)

csense · 3m ago

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.

robocat · 4h ago

> “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.

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...

Kim_Bruning · 3h ago

Utterly buries the lede. The actual content that explains where the blinking cursor comes from is ~1 paragraph.

kristianp · 5h ago

The headline is completely wrong, there was no bug fixed. The blinking cursor was an invention, not a bugfix.

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54 years ago, a programmer fixed a bug – and created an existential crisis

Comments (4)