In text mode displays, it was not possible to show a vertical bar between characters to show where the new text would be inserted, so an underscore or block cursor was used instead. In most command-line interfaces or text editors, the text cursor, also known as a caret, is an underscore, a solid rectangle, or a vertical line, which may be flashing or steady, indicating where text will be placed when entered (the insertion point). The cursor for the Windows Command Prompt (appearing as an underscore at the end of the line) He wrote that the 'bug' would be 'easier' and 'more natural' to use, and unlike a stylus, it would stay still when let go, which meant it would be 'much better for coordination with the keyboard.' Īccording to Roger Bates, a young hardware designer at ARC under Bill English, the cursor on the screen was for some unknown reason also referred to as 'CAT' at the time, which led to calling the new pointing device a 'mouse' as well. On 14 November 1963, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Douglas Engelbart of Augmentation Research Center (ARC) first expressed his thoughts to pursue his objective of developing both hardware and software computer technology to 'augment' human intelligence by pondering how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to inputting X- and Y-coordinate data, and envisioned something like the cursor of a mouse he initially called a 'bug', which, in a '3-point' form, could have a 'drop point and 2 orthogonal wheels'. The term was then transferred to computers through analogy. A cursor is a name given to the transparent slide engraved with a hairline used to mark a point on a slide rule.

Different mouse pointer