Insert Key

History

Computers in the 1980s mostly worked by overwriting the type. If you wanted to type something like print("Hello, world") and you accidentally left off the R, it wasn't a simple matter of just inserting the cursor where you want the missing letter. You generally had to backspace.

Users back then thought that was pretty cool. They were accustomed to typewriters, which lacked the ability to simply go back and edit text. A typist generally had to pull out the paper, apply White-Out (think of it as white paint for paper), wait for it to dry (usually by blowing on it for a few minutes), and then re-inserting and retyping. Some of the fancier models had a delete key of some kind, which used a built-in white-colored ribbon to undo the error.

So the early computer adopters wouldn't have thought much of going back and editing the text. As time passed, though, they opted to include an insert key. This would change the cursor to allow the user to insert text instead of overwrite it.

As it turns out, most users really liked inserting instead of overwriting. As time progressed, programmers began to make the insert key the default setting.