Cursor (user interface)

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".

[1] 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.

"[1] According 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.

[5] On text editors and word processors of modern design on bitmapped displays, the vertical bar is typically used instead.

The concept of a blinking cursor can be attributed to Charles Kiesling Sr. via US Patent 3531796,[6][7] filed in August 1967.

In some cases, the cursor may split into two parts, each indicating where left-to-right and right-to-left text would be inserted.

This kind of pointer is used to manipulate elements of graphical user interfaces such as menus, buttons, scrollbars or any other widget.

When the user stops moving the mouse or removes the stylus from the screen, the trails disappear and the pointer returns to normal.

A client-side exploit known as the Windows Animated Cursor Remote Code Execution Vulnerability used a buffer overflow vulnerability to load malicious code via the animated cursor load routine of Windows.

[22] The idea of a cursor being used as a marker or insertion point for new data or transformations, such as rotation, can be extended to a 3D modeling environment.