In 1977, A Computer Programmer Fixed a Massive Bug — And Created an Existential Crisis

“I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor, and it was simple,” Charles “Chuck” Kiesling’s son writes. “He said there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube.”

The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders’ attention and stand apart from a sea of text.

Did anyone else find that article incredibly disjointed and hard to read?

They never seemed to mention a “bug” or an “existential crisis” either.

Came for the headline, educated myself about typesetting machines on wikipedia after reading the article. Headline was a bit misleading.