Blast from the past: an alternative to a progress bar

I was installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 today when I noticed that in addition to two different progress bars, they had an alterative progress indicator.  It is purely text based and is fairly simple to implement and consists of the following characters:

\

|

/

–

If you display these characters one after the other, in the order specified above, you will create something we used to call a "spinner," which is has the appearance of a spinning bar.  The spinner will spin at different speeds, depending on how fast you cycle through characters.  This is a great technique for keeping the user informed when you're performing a long operation.  Theoretically, as long as the spinner is spinning, you're application is still working and no hung up in some way.  It's not as flashy as a progress bar, but it can be just as effective.

I have not seen this technique used in years ( actually a bunch of years ) but it's good see that some of the old ways still work.