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Related to my earlier question about IBM PC cursors, I am now wondering if there has ever been a monospaced character display system (such as a terminal) that would've implemented a vertical cursor in hardware instead of block/underscore cursors we see in 8bits or PC text mode?

Since vertical cursors are now de facto standard in graphical user interfaces, I want to exclude such systems even if they mostly used monospace fonts.

tuomas
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    You are aware that there is no way to prove that something that could exist doesn't exist and therefor this question can not be answered? [On a side note: The point is not so much about 'Fonts' but fixed wide character cells - back then fonts were something typesetters cared about, but neither computer nor computer users. To create distinguishable fonts one needs space to do so. 5x7 or 8x8 isn't exactly the canvas for a rich 'fonts'] – Raffzahn Oct 05 '22 at 17:32
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    @Raffzahn: A question of the form "did any X ever exist" may not be answerable in the negative with 100% certainty, but that doesn't make it a bad question, especially since it may be possible to definitively say that various major companies never listed such a thing in any of their catalogs, or to identify some obscure company that did produce such a thing. It may be impossible to prove that there wasn't some obscure company somewhere that produced such a thing, but the other kinds of negative and positive answers may still be useful. – supercat Oct 05 '22 at 18:29
  • The answer is probably no but I am to lazy to verify it so I won't write that as an answer...

    I believe the answer is no because of Text Mode monitors which were the most popular hardware implementation for the display side of terminal don't support vertical cursors.

     – Questor Oct 05 '22 at 18:36
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    @Raffzahn yes, after giving this question a bit more thought, I agree and totally see the problem in the wording as such. I'm not sure though if it can be made better by somewhat artificially limiting it to major manufacturers or non-prototype hardware only. I am totally fine to close this question too if it doesn't fit this site, as it well might be unanswerable as such, in case there's no obvious positive for this, either as a full system or as a feature in any of the major chargen/video chipsets of that time. – tuomas Oct 05 '22 at 18:54
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    It is hard to imagine an early raster-based terminal using a vertical cursor. Such a feature would involve extra complexity and cost for little practical gain. However, a vector-based terminal might easily have featured a vertical cursor, just as some offered cross-hairs. -- https://www.cca.org/vector/ – RichF Oct 06 '22 at 12:30
  • As a data point: Vertical cursors mostly make sense for variably-spaced fonts and different font sizes, but even the Xerox Alto, which was one of the first systems with bitmap graphics and an editor with those fonts, used an overlay cursor and not a vertical cursor. So may answer would be "no fixed-font character-based systems, and not even early bitmap-based systems". A better question might be to ask for a timeline of systems that did have a vertical cursor, one might learn something about how the idea spread from this. – dirkt Oct 06 '22 at 14:09
  • @tuomas I did retract the close request. Not because I think it is answerable sthe way it is now, but because I would love to have it sitting here and maybe attract a year or two from now some drive by who tells us about some real unusual approach to cursor, one forgotten by canon. Would you think you could modify it in a way to ask for any terminal with a cursor (unlike a (Glas-) TTY which did not have any) but is not of the usual line/block cursor replacing parts of the character cell static/invers/blinking? After all, those sidelines developments are true gems of independent thinking. – Raffzahn Oct 06 '22 at 14:45

2 Answers2

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I am going to suggest a reframe of the entire question.

Before addressing the question of what the earliest cursors looked like, I want to ask what the cursor represented. From the very earliest text editors, there was some ambiguity as to whether the cursor, (usually called the "current location") represented the current character position, or a location between two current characters.
"delete the current character" usually implied that the current location referred to a character position. Likewise "overwrite one character" implied that the current location is a character position.

But "insert a character before the current character" implies that the current location refers to a position "between" two characters, namely the current character and the one just before it (if there is one).

Text editors go all the way back to "Expensive Typewriter" written for the TX0 computer in the late 1950s. This application didn't use the word "cursor", but it had commands that suggest the current location is a character location, and other commands that suggest that the current location is between two character locations.

Next, I'm going to suggest that the block cursor and the horizontal line cursor both visually suggest a character location, while a vertical line cursor visually suggests a position between two characters. Next, I'm going to note that the early "glass TTY" style terminals had no way of putting anything between two character cells, but could put a cursor in a character cell. This argued against using the vertical line, given the above discussion. The early glass TTY terminals were produced in the 1968-1970 timeframe. DEC got into the fray with the VT05 terminal, eventually superceded by the VT52 and the VT100. All of these terminals required a cursor in a character location, and not between two character locations. AFAIK, they all used either horizontal line or block cursors, sometimes user selectable.

So the answer to your question is that probably no large scale manufacturer of glass TTY terminals used a vertical line cursor. But this is only guesswork.

Walter Mitty
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    In the earliest text editors, used from hardcopy terminals or video terminals used in strict glass-tty mode (no cursor positioning) there was no cursor to worry about. Consequently, in TECO, 'dot' is notionally between characters. 'D' deletes the character after dot; '-D' deletes the character before dot. Of course, once video TECO was invented, the cursor had to be displayed 'after dot'. – dave Oct 06 '22 at 12:27
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    Well, a PDP-1 adaptation of Expensive Typewriter used the PDP-1 scope, IIRC. That device was NOT a glass TTY, and would heve been capable of dsplaying a vertical bar in a location between two character cells. – Walter Mitty Oct 06 '22 at 13:06
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    You could definitely put a vertical cursor "between" two characters by making it something like a one pixel line at the extreme left (or right) edge of the character block and either overprinting into a screen location if possible, unlikely, or alternating between showing the cursor and the character in the same position, basically a version of a flashing cursor. Whether any old hardware actually did this I don't know, but it was definitely possible. But if you are referring to a very specific piece of hardware then I may have misunderstood and then I'd likely be wrong. – hippietrail Oct 06 '22 at 14:58
  • Yes, possible, but almost doubling the complexity and expense of the screen manipulation electronics. – Walter Mitty Oct 07 '22 at 11:02
  • @WalterMitty: The cost difference between a left-side line cursor and a block cursor would often be a gate. An over-bar cursor (which would appear as an underbar if the vertical connections on the yoke were swapped), however, would be often be cheaper than any kind of cursor that needed to be displayed on multiple scan lines. – supercat Oct 09 '22 at 18:41
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It seems like Xerox had such text mode user interface with vertical cursor in 1976.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/25358/4378

tuomas
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  • I'm very dubious that any of what what referenced in that answer can be described as being terminals. (But I'm old, so "terminal" has the pretty specific meaning of being a simple combo of keyboard, control circuitry, and CRT that displays text in fixed (usually) 24x80 cells and is connected by wire to a central server. – RonJohn Oct 09 '22 at 08:46
  • Even though it's using a monospaced font for it's text UI, the Alto is very much not a "monospaced display system" in terms of its hardware. – Michael Graf Oct 09 '22 at 09:43