Cursor

Cursor may refer to:

See also

CURSOR

CURSOR: Programs for PET Computers was the name of an early computer-based "magazine" that was distributed on cassette from 1978 and into the early 1980s. Each issue, consisting of the cassette itself and a short newsletter including a table of contents, contained programs, utilities, and games. Produced for users of the Commodore PET, and available by subscription only, CURSOR was a forerunner of the later disk magazines ("diskmags") that came about as floppy disk drives became common, and eventually ubiquitous, in home and personal computing during the 1980s.

Ron Jeffries and Glen Fisher, of the software company The Code Works of Goleta, California, was CURSOR's publisher and editor, respectively.

Each issue came with five or six programs, preceded by a "cover page" program (which was initially a simple animation, but in later issues became more sophisticated, allowing the user to select a program to be loaded from the tape). Among programs circulated by CURSOR included rudimentary animations, such as "Dromeda", which was an adaptation of the film The Andromeda Strain; games, such as a version of the Star Trek text-based campaign game, "Twonky" (a version of Hunt the Wumpus), and "Ratrun", an early dungeon crawl-style game (only with the player as a mouse searching for a piece of cheese in a 3D maze); and simple utility programs such as spreadsheets and code-tweakers (including a utility that allowed the PET to display lower-case lettering). Initially, programs (specifically games and animations) distributed on Cursor did not have sound, as the PET did not initially have this capability. As external audio devices such as Soundware became available for PET models, sound-capable programs began to appear in Cursor; these programs were identified by an exclamation point (!) in the title. For example: "Aliens!" or "Dromeda!".

Slide rule

The slide rule, also known colloquially in the United States as a slipstick, is a mechanical analog computer. The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as roots, logarithms and trigonometry, but is not normally used for addition or subtraction. Though similar in name and appearance to a standard ruler, the slide rule is not ordinarily used for measuring length or drawing straight lines.

Slide rules exist in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear or circular form with a standardized set of markings (scales) essential to performing mathematical computations. Slide rules manufactured for specialized fields such as aviation or finance typically feature additional scales that aid in calculations common to those fields.

The Reverend William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. Before the advent of the pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering. The use of slide rules continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s even as digital computing devices were being gradually introduced; but around 1974 the handheld electronic scientific calculator made it largely obsolete and most suppliers left the business.