We don’t know exactly why the original ‘ straight up arrow’ envisioned by Doug Engelbart took on the precise angled stance we know today. For the first time, we saw ourselves awkwardly in a screen. * Unlike the text entry models of before, which placed character after character in a facsimile of a typewriter, this was a tether that connected us, embryonic, to the aleph. It was hominem in machina - humanity in the machine. The star of the show, though, was the small line of pixels that made up the mouse cursor.
It was demonstrated in the ‘ Mother of all demos’ - a presentation roughly an hour-and-a-half long that contained not only the world’s first look at the mouse but also hyper linking, document collaboration, video conferencing and more. The original cursor was a dot, then a line pointing straight upwards. It’s an instrument of precision, of tiny click targets on a screen feet away. Slightly angled, with a straight edge and a 45 degree slope leading to a sharp pixel-by-pixel point.
Its everyday utility, pioneered at SRI and Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic * work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years.
Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use.
