A closer look
Douglas Engelbart originally designed the computer mouse cursor to point straight up in 1981, but the Xerox PARC interface team tilted it forty-five degrees to the left because low-resolution screens of the era could not render a straight vertical line without looking like a blurry smudge. Drawing a diagonal line was computationally easier and visually crisper on early pixelated displays. Fast forward to the era of ultra-high-definition retina screens where we can render photorealistic virtual worlds in real-time, yet we are still dragging around a crooked little arrow. It is a beautiful testament to how the tech industry refuses to fix legacy design flaws, permanently locking us into a tilted existence just because some engineers in the eighties had terrible monitors
