Our story takes place in the 1960s, when the efforts to make huge computers easy for everyone to use were at their flaming. At the same time, the progenitors of peripherals that we are used to using now, and whose different varieties can be seen everywhere, began to emerge during this period.
The main protagonist of the story is an inventor named Douglas Engelbart. Although we focus on the mouse in this article, you should know that he is involved in studies that make computer use much easier than when it first came out.
Below you can see the difference between macOS and Windows cursor.
The emergence of the first graphical interfaces was also with the mouse.
Until then, clicking or dragging an object on the screen was considered quite a unique idea for computers used through code. Douglas accomplished this in 1968, with two wheels and a button housed in a wooden case, as you can see in the image above.
Douglas’ activity, known as SRI’s “Ancestor of All Demos,” and displayed in a vectorial rather than pixelated interface, featured a vertical arrow that seemed to leave a blurred trail behind it as it moved. This was the first mouse cursor.
Differences in design soon became apparent.
The PARC company, which is under the umbrella of Xerox, did not include a vertical cursor in its new system, which Douglas created with all the innovations and attracted a lot of attention, unlike Douglas. Instead, there was a black italic cursor designed on the pixel. This system, called the Xerox Alto, was developed in 1973.
This is how the mouse cursor appeared on Apple’s revolutionary Macintosh.
Unlike the previous one, the white overlay placed around the black cursor made this cursor visible on both black and white backgrounds. After Apple, which achieved great success with the Macintosh, Microsoft followed suit. Over time, the quality of the cursors has improved as these two companies expanded their interfaces and capabilities.
A flat cursor could make it indistinguishable from any lines on the screen due to the very limited pixel count.
Being slanted would bring many advantages. First of all, tilting the cursor would increase its visibility on a low-pixel screen and make the object to be clicked easier to see, as opposed to being straight. The resemblance to the shape of our hand while pointing supported this.
Also, being flat could cause some objects on the screen to obscure it. This was not the case with the italic cursor.
The real answer to our question: At the time of this cursor, the resolution of the screens made it difficult to use a straight cursor.
This meant that systems with low resolution also made it difficult to read straight cursors. Cursors bent at 45 degrees appear as a solution to this, and the symmetry part is ignored at this point. If you’ve read this far, now you know.
Now that we can go up to very high resolutions, theoretically there isn’t much that prevents the use of the vertical cursor today. But what we mentioned under the previous title makes the slash cursor usable despite all the time that has passed.
The issue of being symmetrical is about the way we see objects and the design made accordingly.
This is where the term optical balance comes into play. Let’s give a rough example. Let’s have 2 square-shaped areas and put a square on one of them and place a circle on the other. The circle will appear smaller than the square from these two geometric shapes that we put within the same borders.
In other words, shapes close to squares tend to appear larger to our eyes than others. This plays an important role in the design of different objects that will be in the same space, such as emoji sets. For this reason, even though the design is made with perfect dimensions, our perception of it may cause us to see that design as defective.
In this context, it would not be difficult to think that the design was made deliberately by considering the optical balance issue.
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