Is it a blessing or a curse when your recipient can see that you’re composing a message? Some swear that typing bubbles heighten their anxiety, especially in those dreadful moments where they appear, disappear, and appear again.

If you hold such beliefs, learning about the backstory of these typing indicators will change your mind — even if just a little. Stick around, and I’ll explain how.

This article will teach you the origin of typing indicators, different types of typing indicators, how they work, and why they are important features for messaging platforms.

A typing indicator (sometimes called a ‘typing bubble’) is a messaging feature that reveals when a user is composing a message. Like several software features in use today, it was created to solve a specific problem. The story is more interesting than you might think.

In 1997, some IBM developers were working on a chat server to improve the speed and efficiency of their communication at work. During the testing and debugging phase, the team had to shout queries across the room at each other. Senders would go: “Well, have you gotten my message? Are you typing something?!” as soon as they hit send, and receivers would yell back: “Yes I am!” This turned the office into a commotion zone of auditory jump scares and cracked voices.

One day, Jerry Cuomo, IBM’s vice president of blockchain technologies, thought, “This is kind of ridiculous that we’re just shouting every day,” so he teamed up with co-worker Richard Redpath to create one of the first typing indicators in existence, known today as “Someone’s typing…”

However, they chose “someone’s typing…” as the final form after a couple of prior ones had seemed impractical and just…genuinely overwhelming.

The first version of Jerry and Richard’s typing indicator indicated way too much. It showed everyone what each developer was typing as they were typing it. And when that didn’t work, they made the next version that hid each character with asterisks until the message was sent.

That was still an issue, Jerry explained in his interview with SFGate, because someone could compose an entire line of text, decide they didn’t want to say that anymore, and go with a simple “yes” instead. But the person on the other end, who’d already seen them write a bunch of asterisks and erase them, would go, “That’s not what you wanted to say. What were you going to say?” It became clear how unnecessary all of that was, so they just decided on “John is typing…” and called it a day.

And just like that, the patent for this invention was filed in 1997 and approved in 1999.

Impressive how our innate human need to make things easier, or what Jerry Cuomo would refer to as “a case where necessity meets laziness,” birthed one of the most popular and equally necessary features of messaging as we have it today.

Typing indicators come in many styles, but the 3 most common ones are: push notifications, text-based indicators, and visual indicators...