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Why hasn't someone thought of implementing a blinking cursor in hardware, like we did in the early 80's?
by CodeWriter23 10y ago
Why hasn't someone thought of implementing a blinking cursor in hardware, like we did in the early 80's?
- yeukhon 10y agoHow would that work in reality?
- CodeWriter23 10y agoBack in the day you'd write a value into hardware register and the video hardware would draw the cursor at the location designated by the written value. The hardware that was generating the signal to drive the beam would AND the VRAM contents with the register and XOR that result with a clock that pulsed at the blink rate. Voila, blinking cursor. In this day and age, I imagine you write some code that runs in the GPU off a timer interrupt that pumps the texture of a cursor to a location on screen based on a value stored in some scratch RAM. Exposing that interface to some JavaScript running an editor in a browser is left as an exercise for the jackasses who have taken what we would call a SuperComputer back in the day and turned it into wheezing desk heater with a stuttering UI.