Ghosts in the Machine

Boot is fascinated by online culture and the many weird subcultures that it enables. But this story charts the history of a surprisingly prosaic technology. The humble typing indicator was created as a productivity tool for software developers, and it has evolved into a ubiquitous presence that colours virtually any text exchange in your personal or professional life. As Milly Burroughs puts it: “Someone was thinking about you. Writing to you. Not writing to you. The nuance of silence just got a little louder. A little more disturbing.”

When Jerry Cuomo’s team at IBM and Danny Glasser’s team at Microsoft filed patents for the early versions of the typing awareness indicator, they likely didn’t imagine that their invention would become one of the sharpest tools of psychological torment in the digital age. In fact, if their lived experience of the torment of instant messaging services even remotely resembled that of a teenager in 2006, perhaps they wouldn’t be bickering about who should be credited with inventing it in the comments of a LinkedIn article.

Whether messaging friends, family or colleagues, the sudden apparition of a typing indicator — which today most commonly appears as an ellipsis encased in a speech bubble or a “someone is typing...” text notification — can stir potent feelings of anticipation, from anxiety to arousal. Its presence has been known to bring a person to the edge of their seat: teeth gritted, heart racing, nails digging into the stained foam of an ageing office chair. But according to a self-published article penned by Cuomo in 2019, its original purpose was humble convenience, born out of nothing more than laziness.

In 1997, while leading the Advanced Internet Software development squad at IBM in the US state of North Carolina, Cuomo and a team that included Richard Redpath, Sandeep Singhal, Binh Nguyen, Karen Klutz and Carmine Greco were working on Java technology that was sold to Tom Clancy and his Red Storm Entertainment computer game company. It was only after the delivery of two of the company’s early games that the legacy of the developers’ work began to reveal itself — and it had little to do with gaming as they knew it.

IBM had recently acquired Lotus Software, and Cuomo’s team soon found themselves on loan to the company as it focused on harnessing new and more collaborative ways of being online. While Cuomo was keen to focus on what he saw as the obvious potential of multiplayer gaming — such as those being produced by Red Storm Entertainment — the team at Lotus insisted on focusing its resources on the pursuit of instant messaging services, a challenge the original IBM team perceived as a tedious prospect in comparison to their previous projects.

While debugging a chat software that was still under development, members of the team were forced to adopt an inelegantly offline solution for communicating online issues. In Cuomo’s own words:

“Co-creating software in 1997 could be a real pain. No GitHub, Slack or Stack Overflow. No cellphones, tablets or iPods. Offices in IBM RTP had doors — no cubes or agile spaces. We were too lazy to walk back and forth to each other’s offices, so our team perfected a collaboration style that included shouting to each other from our offices.

In our first debug sessions, someone would run the server, a few of us would run the graphical client. We would type and make sure the message was received in full by the recipient. Pretty boring.

Sometimes we would just sit there and wonder: is Richard typing, or did he go get a snack at the machines? If you walked the hallways, it would not be uncommon to hear us asking the same question over and over again.

“‘Are you typing or did the server crash? Hey, are you there? Are you typing? Hey!’”

Unimpressed with this jarring verbal ping-pong, the team conceived a notification system that quickly revealed flaws of its own and, despite many evolutions, continues to pique our adrenal responses today. Cuomo continues:

“After the first day [of shouting to each other], I decided to clear up the uncertainty by adding a debug message at the bottom of the chat window that simply echoed what the person was typing. While this gave instant feedback and reduced the ‘Are you typing?’ question, it also unintentionally introduced the first hint of social anxiety.

“You see, some of us were not the best spellers. So, after a few embarrassing ‘there’ versus ‘their’ moments, I changed the debug message to simply echo an ‘x’ after every character typed.

“This had another interesting side effect. We would sometimes notice, as someone typed a long sequence of x’s, that before they pressed Enter to send the message, the sequence would start to shorten, only to result in a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer.

“We would quickly shout at the person, ‘Hey, you were going to say more — what were you going to say?’

It was at this moment that I changed the debug message to simply say: ‘Richard is typing...’”

With Cuomo and Redpath credited as its inventors, US Patent Number 5,990,887 — the patent for the world’s first typing indicator — was filed on 30 October 1997, titled ‘Method and system for efficient network-desirable chat feedback over a communication network’.

The typing indicator was quickly adopted by almost all chat-based services, but Microsoft developer Glasser claims he invented a more fully formed version than Cuomo and Redpath’s while working on MSN Messenger 1.0, as society raced toward a new millennium — an iteration more reminiscent of what we now see rolled out across WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram DMs, Slack and even customer support chat services. Notably, the Microsoft Teams system of instant messaging and video calling that so many businesses rely on to connect their global communities of employees today is a mere distillation of the same technology and interfaces MSN Messenger once used to bring together teenagers listening to Taking Back Sunday in musty bedrooms around the world.

MSN Messenger Service launched on 21 July 1999, the same day that Glasser’s team at Microsoft filed their own typing indicator invention as US Patent 6,519,639, also known as ‘System and method for activity monitoring and reporting in a computer network’. In the press release announcing the launch — which, like everything else since the mid-nineties, is perfectly preserved in the archives of the internet — Microsoft proclaims:

“MSN Messenger Service tells consumers when their friends, family and colleagues are online and enables them to exchange online messages and e-mail with the more than 40 million users of the MSN Hotmail^TM Web-based e-mail service as well as with people using AOL Instant Messenger.”

MSN Messenger Service told users when other users were online. It also told them when they were typing. Even in 1999, the inventors of instant messaging as we know it knew this was the story — the hook that would get people hooked.

We already had email, and SMS messaging had been available on mobile phone networks since 1994. But this was different. This allowed us to connect with the ghosts in the machine. Seeing whether other users were online or not was definitely something, but the typing indicator made it something personal.

Someone was thinking about you. Writing to you. Not writing to you. The nuance of silence just got a little louder. A little more disturbing.

While not named on the patent due to the technical limitations of what it covers, David Auerbach worked collaboratively with Glasser to deliver the interface for MSN Messenger 1.0’s typing indicator. Writing for Slate magazine in 2014, Auerbach reveals that their now obsolete “keep-alive” format of indicator — which sent repeated “someone is typing...” notifications at intervals as users continued to write — was responsible for more traffic than what was actually typed. He discloses:

“At one point we estimated that something like 95 percent of all message traffic through the Messenger servers consisted of those typing messages. Only 5 percent of messages actually contained what users actually had typed.”

It begs the question: did Auerbach, Glasser, Cuomo or Redpath know what they’d done? Faced with statistics like this, were the team behind MSN Messenger 1.0 thinking about the new digital power dynamics they were responsible for facilitating? Even if they weren’t, the careful wording of the press release announcement suggests somebody at Microsoft definitely was.

There has always been a loneliness to the human condition, but the invention of the internet and the early-noughties advent of what has become colloquially known as ‘the family computer’ meant that suddenly one lonely teen could connect with another with unprecedented ease. To a soundtrack of clanging dial-up tones and whirring hard drives, we made our way to each other and created a new digital lexicon.

With the invention of the typing indicator, and the read receipts followed, we have been granted the tools to generate perceptions based on action and inaction, without ever reading an actual word written by the other person. People do this every day in in-person social situations, scanning body language and facial expressions for signals and further context. But what happens to our interpretation of unspoken language when the vocabulary of signals is limited to “emo.princess_666 is online” and “</3_UrSoLastSummer93_</3 is typing...”?

Imagination takes over and, as a therapist once told me, our imaginations have a natural tendency to lean towards the worst-case scenario or, in cases of delusion, a dangerously inaccurate assumption about the other person’s actions or intent.

The human mind is generally quick to identify patterns of action and reaction, and we’ve been known to weaponise the pain caused by these psychological phenomena that we first recognise in ourselves. Taking our lives online has added further poison to the well. Making anything visible invites conversation around it. So to take something seemingly innocuous — such as the act of typing — and rebrand it as a signpost-worthy event welcomes superfluous discussion of the subject.

Examine your conversations with friends about digital interactions, and you might be surprised just how often your analysis falls not among the details of what someone said, but on whether it seemed like they were going to say something and didn’t (David was typing, and then he wasn’t), or whether they appear to have read something sent to them, or not.

As users in dialogue, we are simultaneously senders and recipients. We understand the weight our online statuses carry, and we have learned how to use them to titillate, torture and reject others, communicating a message that we are perhaps too cowardly, or simply unwilling, to articulate in our own words.

This is arguably one of the more unflattering angles from which to view the act of living in the 21st century, so why are Cuomo, Redpath and Glasser so desperate to be recognised as the architects of it? In a blog post from 2019, published on the twentieth anniversary of his typing indicator patent, Glasser claims that of all the patents he is named on — including several where he is listed as an inventor alongside Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — this is the one he is most proud of.

But is the world better for it? If IBM had an open-plan office in 1997, and Cuomo and Redpath had never needed to shout from room to room — thus negating the need for a typing indicator during their debugging process — would society be worse off?

It’s not just the typing indicator. From Find My Friends and Find My Phone to live traffic updates on Google Maps, Alexa and AirTags, early computing innovations such as these by IBM and Microsoft have jet-fuelled a culture of self-surveillance. The majority of the blog posts and articles featuring Cuomo and Glasser’s words were published in 2019, as the twentieth anniversary of IBM’s patent being granted and Microsoft’s patent being filed allowed both inventors to centre themselves in digital history once more.

Earlier I posed the question of whether the developers considered the cultural and societal legacy of their inventions as they were creating them. We may never know the answer to that (neither party responded to requests for comment), but what is worth noting is that, handed the opportunity to reflect on their work two decades later, neither Cuomo nor Glasser made any commentary on their contributions to the post-internet collective consciousness, merely relating the typing indicator’s innovation milestone to their own personal achievements.

Glasser recalls using the invention as an example when visiting his child’s school for a “what your parent does for a living” session, while Cuomo simply states: “Some like it, some don’t. But for me, it’s a story that reminds me of the great days of my early career at IBM.”

Boot explores the politics of image-based work, engaging with themes such as subculture, sexuality, fantasy, online culture, and DIY communities. It publishes transgressive visuals that challenge conventional representations of reality and society.

Milly Burroughs is a Berlin-based writer, editor and strategist specialising in art, architecture and culture. She is fascinated by that which connects us. Her bylines include Wallpaper*, AnOther, DAZED, 10 Magazine, It's Nice That, Carhartt WIP, LUX, Ton, Fotografiska, Boot Mag and more. She is also one quarter of the Berlin-based art collective I WOULD DIE FOR ANYTHING.

Tara Keogh is an independent illustrator and graphic designer based in Paris. She grew up between Paris and Dublin and studied at the Le Havre School of Art and Design. Drawn to lines and vibrant colours, her work is inspired by a love of poetry, an attentiveness to dreams, and the nuances of everyday life. You can see more of her work on Instagram.