Oh, yes, the Godzilla mouse cursor was a great feature, and as I recall there wasn't such on the Xerox Altos that were donated to MIT in ~1980. In those days,

Oh, yes, the Godzilla mouse cursor was a great feature, and as I recall there wasn't such on the Xerox Altos that were donated to MIT in ~1980. In those days, pretty much anyone developing a window system was doing serious innovation. There was another big UI detail that's been somewhat lost, a "don't move the text" default behavior you see with the less program. When I first visited Western Digital, which was developing the 68000 engineering workstation that LMI's first custom processor was going to run in back then in 1982, the people developing the video were spending a lot of effort and budget on scrolling of the bitmapped screen. The MIT AI Lab's approach, initially out of necessity when they first did this with a first generation PDP-11/20 and Intel 1103 first generation DRAMs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_1103 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_1103), they just kept the text in place and moved the cursor, which can be confusing in that new text is not automatically at the bottom, but is a lot easier to skim and read than moving text.