Posted by SeenNotHeard 4 days ago
Well before DOS was a thing, the mini I programed on was using Tabs to move between the TUI fields. Once you were happy you would press RETURN to process the data. At the time, seems IBM was trying to avoid doing anything similar to any of its competition.
I'm aware of folklore.org, but I wish there were something equivalent within Apple itself. Sadly, it's not part of Apple's culture.
It was 1992. I was a summer intern on the System Software team. One of my projects was to improve a Disk Initialization Package feature to mark bad blocks found during disk init. The existing feature worked, but it was super slow, it didn't show progress, and it wasn't cancellable.
The UI was the trickiest part. I'd improved the speed a lot, but we still couldn't know how long the whole process would take, so every heuristic I used to show remaining time was awful.
I noticed this guy a few cubicles down had a "User Interface" title, so I wondered whether he'd be able to help. I asked him if he had a minute, and sat down and hashed it out with Apple employee #4, Bill Fernandez, the person who introduced the two Steves to each other.
He was truly the nicest person I met that summer, other than my manager. He completely understood the problem instantly and came up with a great solution: ditch the time estimate and replace it with an indeterminate progress bar that advanced as each disk track was tested. It worked, people liked it, and it shipped with the point release after 7.1.
Not quite as gee-whiz as any of Raymond's articles, but it's a start!
Of course, that assumes it came from a place of corporate strategy rather than individual habit, which could have been learned from other older systems.
You have to keep a mental context of whether you need to hold shift before you press return. See also: every message I've ever sent that ended with I' because I fat-fingered the ' key while typing a contraction.
(And yes I do miss those - with an external keyboard these get less painful but still don't work 100% like on a PC)
Because sometimes you still do want to insert text with all caps, for example as part of an ID. Also Caps Lock as opposed to Shift Look is quite useful when you want to insert caps and numbers quickly, again as part of IDs.
> What does ScrLk key on my keyboard do?
It switches between the cursor or scroll wheel or the mouse moving the cursor or the viewport/document. It's quite useful. Firefox e.g. implements this functionality under F7.
> Why is there an Ins key when practically every text edit field is in insert mode anyway?
To switch, because sometimes you do want replacement mode. Also it is useful for the Ctrl-/Shift-Ins, which is the original CUA key for what people now know as Ctrl-C/V. It is quite useful for when the latter means something else.
> How often do you actually use the Pause key and what does it do?
It used to still work for a while in Linux, but sadly they removed it. Also it is still useful for the CTRL-ALT SysRQ, Pause sequence to advise the OS, when nothing else works, or you don't want to shutdown properly. Also it feels quite powerful to tell the computer to be off, and it basically immediately being off.
Mostly not to destroy people's muscle memory, I think.
People have gotten used to, and expect certain behaviour from OS+apps. Futz with that, and users become annoyed, frustrated, or ditch an otherwise fine piece of software.
In other words: history / inertia.
They still depended on IBM to some degree. If IBM stopped shipping Microsoft products on their PCs, it would hurt Microsoft quite a lot. But, clones had just begun to break out. Compaq and a few dozen other clone makers were exploding in popularity. I imagine Gates must have seen their orders from clone makers growing exponentially, and much faster than sales to IBM, and realized they didn't really have to kowtow to IBM, anymore.
A real shame about OS/2, though.
[1] to linkedin: making up anecdotes in order to create engagement in a professional setting. Often in the form of 'Today I learned' or '15 things my toddler taught me about stockpile management'.
"I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous." - David Bradley (IBM), creator of the Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut key.
Microsoft has become IBM. IBM has become CA. Apple has become Microsoft. Oracle has become DEC (if DEC had a few more lawyers.) Amazon has become Oracle.
MSFT maintains a research arm (MSR) which routinely produces interesting concepts. Not that they would ever try to turn them into products. So maybe MSFT also turned into Xerox.