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IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#181

Post by Waterluvian »

jimbokun wrote: post #25
INTPenis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non english speaker trying to wrap my head around what Brendan said to you. I was once told that the tab key can be represented in different ways on different systems, and that's why spaces are safer because they're always represented the same. Is that what Brendan was trying to say?

Literally try entering a "tab" character in a Hacker News reply. For me in Safari, it changes the focus to the "reply" button. It's literally difficult to enter a "tab" character into many text entry fields and dialogs and applications, because it's used so often as a navigation key.

I can’t find the tab key on my phone. Please advise.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#182

Post by JKCalhoun »

jasomill wrote: post #159
jjwiseman wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mr. Show, "Change for a Dollar": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyocQT4Vn2g

Should have gone to First CityWide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXDxNCzUspM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg

I love First City Wide. They really came through when I was heading out to go camping and knew I might need quarters for the showers.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#183

Post by rmunn »

jasomill wrote: post #163
Animats wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a real IBM 3270 keyboard.[1] Note the "Next field" key on the left, and the matching "Previous field" key on the right. The IBM 3270 was a device for filling up forms. The mainframe sent the terminal a form with blanks, and the terminal let the user fill in the blanks. The terminal hardware prevented the user from overwriting the static parts of the form, and could apply some other form constraints, such as nu…

My favorite feature of 3270/5250-style keyboard layouts is the separate carriage return and Enter keys, allowing for multiline text entry without special handling to avoid conflicts with the command to signify that input is complete. With only a single combined Enter/Return key, it's hard to remember in any given context whether Shift+Enter or Control+Enter will open up a new line instead of immediately sending a mes…

The software I've used has been pretty consistent about Shift+Enter meaning "new line without triggering the Enter key action" and Ctrl+Enter meaning "action" (send the message, go to the next field, etc). The behavior of the Enter key varies from program to program, but I have yet to find a program where Shift+Enter triggered an action while Ctrl+Enter did not. Which software are you using where Shift+Enter triggers an action?

(I do agree that it's hard to remember what Enter is going to do, of course. It's just Shift+Enter where my experience differs from yours).

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#184

Post by CSSer »

atl_tom wrote: post #168
AndrewStephens wrote: post #124

IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what would now be called a QA engineering. At that time everyone wore suits to work but the culture was changing so the interns put in a request to be allowed casual Fridays. Bear in mind that they were locked in a back room somewhere without any c…

My dad was am IBM lifer, when they said they could wear suits that weren't black he wore a blue suit and his boss asked him if he rode the bus to work.

Wait, I'm confused. Was that supposed to be an insult?!

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#185

Post by daemin »

deburo wrote: post #18
connorboyle wrote: post #7

A great read, although I'd still like to know what IBM's reasoning for opposing this use of the Tab key was. Is it because they didn't want Tab to be both an input and a control character? I.e. there are some cases where you can type a Tab into an input field, and there are other cases where you can't, and it's not immediately obvious which ones are which? All the way in 2026, I would still be sympathetic to this vie…

I now imagine a world where CAPSLOCK is used as "select the next input" and TAB as the character.

Arguably the capslock key is more useful than something like the insert or break keys.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#186

Post by jasomill »

xp84 wrote: post #131
jjmarr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the historical context. Prior to patents, inventions would commercialized as magic tricks and the mechanisms hidden. Then the inventor died and the secrets were lost. For example, Cornelis Drebbel air conditioned Westminster Abbey in 1620. King James I (of the Bible) thought it was a cool party trick. But there was little ecosystem to commercialize and Drebbel moved on with his life, trying to sell oth…

Comments like this are the absolute best part of HN. Thank you for sharing this.

Likewise.

And after reading the Wikipedia article on Drebbel, how have I never heard of this guy?

I'm particularly curious how the Royal Navy failed to realize the value of the submarine.

Reading over the article on the history of the torpedo, it sounds like early attempts to weaponize, by Drebbel and others, were unsuccessful.

Even so — bearing in mind that this a undoubtably a reflection of my own bias as a child of the Cold War raised in the shadow of the largest military-industrial complex the world has ever known — I can't help but marvel at the fact that no spare-no-expenses crash development programs arose to operationalize effective submarine-based warfare by the naval powers of the time.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#187

Post by esafak »

jnpnj wrote: post #122

I find admirable how every era was filled with fights on just about every detail. Keys included, layout, shape, meaning. And now nobody pays attention that any of this at all. Very strange and funny at the same time.

Did you not catch the debate about Tahoe's glassmorphism?

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#188

Post by nomel »

CSSer wrote: post #184
atl_tom wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad was am IBM lifer, when they said they could wear suits that weren't black he wore a blue suit and his boss asked him if he rode the bus to work.

Wait, I'm confused. Was that supposed to be an insult?!

This is a very legitimate question: In the US, where is it not?

Public buses aren't safe, clean, or timely. Where I am, it's 2.5 hours rather than a 26 minute commute by car. The only reason you ride one is usually if you are already in the proximity of your destination, especially if that destination is downtown. For all other cases, private or ride-share makes way more sense. We're talking buses here, not shuttles, light rails, monorails, etc.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#189

Post by Rendello »

tuetuopay wrote: post #93
donatj wrote: post #14

As someone who prefers tabs (I'm not looking to argue), I once asked Brendan Eich on Twitter why he prefers spaces. His answer was more thoughtful than I'd expected. The tab key itself is hijacked by modern OS/UI behavior. It makes it complicated to actually type literal tab characters in certain contexts, particularly in the browser. I still prefer tabs (and I'm a Go developer), but he is absolutely correct about th…

Yeah but, even ones that don't use literal tab characters use the tab key to write code, right? RIGHT? Like, does he hit space N times? I somewhat get the argument, but if you're writing code in the HN textarea you're doing something wrong (for code where tab/space matters anyways). Like, any code editor will use the tab key properly. Though, it sills maddens me there's no somewhat universal tab-entry in OSes like we…

> Like, does he hit space N times?

Like the girl in Silicon Valley! [1]

I thought it was a bit funny that she was just hitting the space key over and over, but around the same time all my hobby programming was in TempleOS and I did the same thing. The indents were only 2 spaces though, and the tabs were eight wide.

Actually TempleOS' creator Terry Davis mixed tabs and spaces for the same argument stated in the Silicon Valley video, to save bytes. They're all rendered as spaces on the website but in the actual TempleOS code it's a mix of both. It means the indentation is really wonky on the Github mirrors (above 8 "spaces" deep), compare [2] and [3].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRva7UxGQDw

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20180906060812/https://templeos....

3. https://github.com/cia-foundation/TempleOS/blob/archive/Demo...

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#190

Post by jiggawatts »

derefr wrote: post #178
jiggawatts wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with a lot of government departments. The "policy" is not a thing that can enforce itself, and often barely exists at all. Rarely is it actually written down! Mostly these things boil down to a vetocracy where all managers in some hierarch must say 'yes', otherwise a single 'no' is a final 'no'. Hence, the trick is not to ask because the more people are involved the higher the chance that one of them will say…

> The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting. Not particularly clever. My experience is that low-level team/line managers typically already have the authority to say "no" to their own people; but they don't want to take the blame for saying "no" (they want their team to like them!), so by punting the decision up the chain, they're effectively…

> Sometimes this backfires badly: not only does everyone above them say yes, but someone somewhere up the chain loves the idea, and turns it into an "initiative" — i.e. something the line-level manager is now locked into doing.

I've seen a variant of this (repeatedly!) where a sales person will suggest the bronze/silver/gold/platinum edition of some product to a manager, the decision goes up the chain (unnecessarily), and then someone near the top says: "Platinum sounds the best!". Nobody dares take responsibility for suggesting "anything less than the best", so it gets locked in.

Meanwhile, the platinum edition exists only to make the silver and gold pricing look reasonable, so now... now... the consultant has to implement a solution based on the "bells & whistles edition" which takes 10x as long and has a bunch of issues. E.g.: "clustered" versus simply "active-passive" or weird nonstandard high bandwidth ports instead of ordinary Ethernet, etc.

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