Early 1980s BBSes and spinning cursors.

There is a whole generation that has no idea how much cool stuff folks did with text and backspace.

One of my favorites was the “spinning cursor.” Thanks to slow speeds of 300 baud modems, you could get some interesting effects by printing a letter, then printing a character like a slash (“/”), then a backspace, then a dash (“-“), then a backspace, then a backslash (“\”), then a backspace, then a vertical bar (“|”) or exclamation mark (“!”) if your system did not have the vertical bar. Then a backspace and the next letter of the message.

Apparently I got nostalgic about this effect some time ago. I just found this “Spinning Cursor” C project I wrote on the Online GDB compiler:

https://onlinegdb.com/56zozL_gRp

Go there and you can RUN the project and see it in all its glory…

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