Are Mice Necessary? (Excerpt #2 of a Work in Progress)

The word cursor comes from the Latin verb currere, “to run.” It is related to the word cursive, referring to “penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster.”* A cursor is literally a runner; a running messenger. Whoever gave the computer cursor its name was making a metaphor, invoking an envoy, an errand-runner in an electronic system.

The first cursors were invisible. Before the mouse and the video display exposed computer programs to our senses in real time, a “cursor” was a phantom — an (imaginary) insertion point in a file accessed by a line editor,* a prototypical form of the computer text editor. Line editors arose in the late 1950s or early 1960s, around the same time as the first computer operating systems. The first line editor interfaces incorporated typewriters, keypunches, and teleprinters. The editing and display of a file took place separately — “edits were verified by typing a command to [physically] print a small section of the file, and periodically by printing the entire file.”* Computer terminals with cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays began proliferating in the late sixties and early seventies, and with them, new, full-screen text editors such as O26, which was developed at the Institute for Defense Analyses in 1967.

In 1975, Bill Joy and Charles Haley were studying computer science at Berkeley and “hacking around on” text editors including Unix’s ed using the ADM-3A video display terminal. They developed a new Unix line editor called ex, and in 1976, Joy wrote the foundational code for vi, a new text editor. vi stands for “visual;” the name was “derived from the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the ex command visual, which switches…to its full-screen mode.”

In a 1984 interview in Unix Review, Joy said:

The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn’t have a mouse and therefore you’ve got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you’d get from a mouse-oriented thing. I think multiple levels of undo would be wonderful, too. But fundamentally, vi is still ed inside. You can’t really fool it.

(…to be continued…)

*Wikipedia