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Back in the dark ages, "idiot dots" or "idiot marks" was a phrase I heard for the various text terminal equivalents. It would cycle through a small number of t
by saltcured 1y ago
Back in the dark ages, "idiot dots" or "idiot marks" was a phrase I heard for the various text terminal equivalents.
It would cycle through a small number of text values with some kind of backspace/overwrite to keep things localized to where the cursor ought to be.
One version was a variable length ellipses: . .. ... that would grow and reset in place.
Another was an expanding "dot": . o O that would cycle in place as one character.
And the early "spinner" was: - \ | / that would cycle in place as one character. Hmm, not sure this will render properly on HN but it is hyphen, backslash, pipe, forward slash.
- winocm 1y agoThe latter is known as a "twiddle" in BSD land. (c.f: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/lib/libsa/twiddle.c https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/...)
- foxglacier 1y agoAlso back then the movement of the symbols was kind of proof that the program was still running properly and not crashed because it had to be updating the symbols. But nowadays, waiting animations are independent of the thing they're waiting for and their movement isn't a sign of life but just a puppet made from a corpse.