The iPhone and later the iPad didnвЂ™t immediately re-invent the cursor. But for the past few years, thanks to touch devices, weвЂ™ve had a new, fleshier, sprinter: our finger. There are many self-assured conjectures about the change, but few actual answers - all we know for sure is that, like a ready athlete, the arrow pointer has been there, waiting to leap towards our goal for decades. We donвЂ™t know exactly why the original вЂ straight up arrowвЂ™ envisioned by Doug Engelbart took on the precise angled stance we know today. For the first time, we saw ourselves awkwardly in a screen. * Unlike the text entry models of before, which placed character after character in a facsimile of a typewriter, this was a tether that connected us, embryonic, to the aleph. It was hominem in machina - humanity in the machine. The star of the show, though, was the small line of pixels that made up the mouse cursor. It was demonstrated in the вЂ Mother of all demosвЂ™ - a presentation roughly an hour-and-a-half long that contained not only the worldвЂ™s first look at the mouse but also hyper linking, document collaboration, video conferencing and more. The original cursor was a dot, then a line pointing straight upwards.

ItвЂ™s an instrument of precision, of tiny click targets on a screen feet away. Slightly angled, with a straight edge and a 45 degree slope leading to a sharp pixel-by-pixel point. Its everyday utility, pioneered at SRI and Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic * work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years. Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use.

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