The small things matter. Especially in design. They show you deep nuances of the past and the future, without you even realising it. I couldn’t help but ponder this recently as I trundled into a hyper-fixation on the origins of the computer cursor.
The obsession, which lasted for months, started one afternoon when I was mocking up a UI design for the engineer I was working with. Sometimes when I want to demonstrate what a hover state does, I’ll add a little PNG of a cursor. As I dropped my usual PNG onto the canvas, I compared it to my actual computer cursor.
I paused.
The muscle memory that usually allows me to glide through everyday tasks like this on auto-pilot glitched.
Oh, it’s been updated.
The little Mickey Mouse hand I’d become accustomed to had changed to a streamlined pointing hand, and it felt like someone had marginally re-arranged the furniture in my front room without my knowledge or consent.
Change is strange, unfamiliar. I know all too well, from working in design, that people tend to hate it. Well, they think they do. They say they do. But then a week, a month, a year passes; their eyes adjust, the new version becomes the norm, and they forget they were ever meant to hate the update in the first place. I’ve seen it countless times with companies updating their brands, their product UX, their typography.
But for some reason, this change sparked a curiosity in me. Why is the cursor designed how it is in the first place? How did that little arrow, used by millions of people millions of times, come to be? Why does it angle to the left? My attempt to shed light on these questions took me to some interesting digital crevices.
The Mother of All Demos
The origins of the cursor began in 1968. That’s when Douglas Engelbart (an American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer of computer science) had convinced NASA to let him borrow a 22-foot screen. He wanted to use it to demonstrate his seminal computer program, the NLS system, at a conference in San Francisco.
This moment, which later became known as The Mother of All Demos, is the first known use of a mouse and a cursor in public. Engelbart’s mouse was made of wood! He realised that a pair of small wheels, similar to those on a planimeter (a Victorian land-surveying tool used by cartographers to measure irregular shapes on maps) could be used to track X-Y coordinates on a screen.
This demo was packed with first of its kind features and what went on to be core elements of personal computing, including windows, hypertext, graphics, digital navigation and command inputs, etc. Including the first ever known computer cursor – a vertical arrow pointing up. The cursor was born.
You have to appreciate that before computers were operated via punch cards. So The Mother of All Demos was a huge breakthrough. It ended up laying groundwork for personal computing to come.
The way your cursor morphs depending on the context (like in present day if you’re hovering over an input it becomes the ‘I’ or when you hover over something it indicates if it’s clickable). This idea is as old as the cursor itself. In the demo, Douglas’ cursor transformed into a cross, for instance, to indicate an action.
The mouse was called that because the cord looked like a tail. I knew that much before I started this odd odyssey into its history. But what I didn’t know was that it was also because the cursor itself was the cat. The mouse and cat chased each other across the screen! A delightful fact that I enjoy explaining at house parties, in the pub, and now on Substack.
‘Stickiness is Both a Boon and a Sludge’
There were no big developments in the design of the cursor until 1973. But it was a big one…
It tilted.
The first machine that somewhat looked like a personal computer was the Xerox Alto, introduced at Xerox PARC. It included a chunky old TV-esque screen that came tethered to what today could be confused with an air conditioning unit.
Alan Kay (a computer scientist working there) took personal credit for tilting the cursor. Writing in an email, he told engineer James Hill-Khurana. “It stuck, as so many things in computing.” He added: “Stickiness can be a boon and a sludge.”
The screen on a Xerox Alto rendered on a 16x16 grid and the thin vertical cursor would have been almost invisible on a busy screen. So, Kay tilted the cursor 45 degrees which made it a lot easier to see.
But why tilt it left, not right? Supposedly because the bitmap origin sits in the upper left pixel and tilting the cursor left means that it lands at the origin.
Pixel by pixel
Nine years later, in January 1983, the now legendary designer Susan Kare joined Apple as a part-time graphic designer. When she was tasked with creating a visual language for the first Apple Macintosh personal computer, she had no formal digital design training. She was also working at a sculpture museum.
She bought a graph paper notebook and started sketching pixel-by-pixel on the page before translating her designs to digital. Then she feverishly user tested the prospective icons with strangers, asking participants to explain in detail how they felt about them. She’d then get the final sign off from Steve Jobs himself.
She ended up creating so many of Apple’s iconic features; one of my personal favourites is the Command key symbol (⌘). She adapted that from something she found in a symbol dictionary. It turns out it was a Swedish icon, used to indicate the location of notable landmarks in and around campsites.
Kare didn’t change the overall cursor symbol from the 1970s version, but she refined it and added in more contextual elements – including the open hand for grabbing and the wristwatch cursor to symbolise waiting.
Apple also changed the classic cursor by adding a white outline around the black arrow so it would be visible on both light and dark backgrounds. Apple’s cursor didn’t change even a single pixel from this point, for 22 years.
Microsoft kept tweaking their cursor design, making small adjustments like the length of the point, etc.
Stacks and Cards and LSD
In 1985, Apple’s 51st employee Bill Atkinson was suffering from a deep depression following the commercial failure of his last project. He sat on a concrete park bench near his home and took LSD in a bid to treat his condition.
He recalls “staring into the vast collections of pixels that made up the night sky” and seeing the universe “as something coming alive”. Witnessing what he believed to be “consciousness propagating”, it led him to consider a world where “knowledge wants to be linked”.
Two years on from the epic trip, he released HyperCard: A software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers.
Its brilliance lay in its simplicity. It was built on the metaphor of “stacks” and “cards”; a stack was like a digital card stack (imagine a stack of index cards) and each card could contain text, images, buttons, fields, sounds, and interactive elements.
The idea was that each ‘card’ had pieces of information or interactive elements that a user could mix and match. People could click card to card by using buttons or links, browsing information in a modern, non-linear ‘clickable’ sense. It bore all the hallmarks of an early web and was, in fact, one of the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.
An interactive element inside HyperCard was where you hovered over a card and the cursor changed into a pointing finger. It was the first time anywhere that hovering over a clickable thing gave you a pointing hand.
That gesture, the cursor changing shape to say this is a link gesturing outward, would later go into every web browser ever made, and eventually back into Apple's own operating system as the system-wide cursor.
Sparkle Trails and Pokémon
The popularity of personal computing meant that the small cursor connected to a mouse or a trackpad became a commonly-recognised function.
In the 1990s, Mac had its black arrow, the wristwatch, the I-beam for text, and the crosshair. Windows 3.1 had its arrow and hourglass. The cursor was a system-level thing you didn’t really think about changing.
Then Windows 95 changed people’s relationship to cursors, ushering in the era of personalisation. The OS introduced animated cursors and made cursor schemes a built-in personalisation feature in the Control Panel. Suddenly the hourglass could be a spinning globe, a galloping horse, a dinosaur, a banana, whatever you want. Websites like Cursors-4-U and ZDNet’s acted as download libraries with thousands of free cursor packs. Cursors could leave sparkle trails, hold flowers or be your favourite Pokémon.
In the late 1990s sites like Comet Cursor and Cursor Mania, allowed visitors to set custom cursors. So you’d land on a fan site for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and your cursor would turn into a stake. It was loved until people realised it was tracking users across sites. It was later classified as spyware by security tools.
As the new millennium peeked over the horizon and everyone realised that the Millennium Bug wasn’t going to throw the digital world into chaos,OS-level cursor customisation faded. More polished anti-aliased objects that didn’t invite customisation became the norm. Aqua arrived with Mac OS X in 2001. The web moved to a design consistency and cursors became something you didn’t change.
The Mickey Mouse Hand
I still needed answers around the original cursor that sparked my interest in the first place. Why had it disappeared completely from my digital life?
I found a picture of an old watch which seems to be the earliest use of the style of hand for ‘direction’. Apparently it was introduced around the Mac OS 9 (1999) era, but why and by whom was oddly hard to pin down. It evolved across redesigns, by Apple designers whose names mostly aren’t recorded.
I saw theories online. Did it come from an old point-and-click adventure game? They tended to use hand icons. Was the glove hand used to indicate a symbolic butler or assistant who was primed to complete arduous online tasks on your behalf, à la Ask Jeeves?
Alas, my questions never transformed into answers, but the glove remained until the fatal OS update of macOS Tahoe (2025), when they decided to update the hover cursor to the new streamlined hand for a new, streamlined time. In some ways the updated Tahoe hover cursor feels like a return to HyperCard’s original design, I see elements of Susan Kare in it.
The Mickey Mouse hand was an obsolete piece of UI that disappeared and with it a little bit of internet history was silently dissolved. But I’m still gonna use it in my designs.
I like it. But not quite as much as I like the obscure, long-winded, and weirdly comforting history of how it came to be.
Written by hand.
Erin. Product designer.
Self-proclaimed internet anthologist.
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this, Erin! May there be many more utterly obscure things waiting to be uncovered.🙌🏼
Such a pleasure to read. Thank you for this delightful journey, Erin! 😊