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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

#211

Post by ButlerianJihad »

rbanffy wrote: post #210
badsectoracula wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is: this one. Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.

I don't really remember many Windows 95 firsts. One I remember is the ability to switch users without logging off. MacOS famously copied that (with a 3D cube look). I think they made something really revolutionary at the IE3 time. Their News and Mail app was an Explorer extension that placed an e-mail reader as the presentation of a folder full of folders of mailboxes and messages. You wouldn't see the extension, as…

At my first ISP job, I eventually started using mh for mail. It was based on an awesome concept of sorting everything into directories and having procmail and various helpers to pre-process, including upon receipt and reading. I remember little of the details, but it was truly for the gung-ho neckbeard crowd, and it was well-suited for processing "large amounts" of mail (1993 style). I think MMDF was the MTA trying to do similar things in that vein. Meanwhile my boss was in love with PINE...

Of course, working at an ISP I could also telnet to our NNTP server and read Usenet on the local filesystem. Ugh.

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

#212

Post by pseudalopex »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #206
pseudalopex wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What of Crockford's argument interested you? The typewriter history was irrelevant. He said people argued how wide should a tab be. And this caused misery. But almost all tabs advocates said tabs should be any width you want in my experience. And spaces advocates argued how many spaces should indentation be. He said there was no value in the conflict. There is value in accessibility.[1][2] He said tabs could be elimi…

> What of Crockford's argument interested you? That tabs can be eliminated but spaces not. The rest is incidental to this idea.

An action could be made is not an argument it should be made. You could eliminate ' with " and escape sequences in some languages.

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

#213

Post by bbatha »

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.

Interesting, IBM sales and consulting were infamous for sending in an army of blue suits in

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

#214

Post by ButlerianJihad »

ch_123 wrote: post #13

I find this story odd because IBM was consistent with their keyboard nomenclature across multiple products, and the 3270 series mainframe terminals used the Tab key, located in the same place where you would find a tab key on a modern keyboard, to move the cursor to the next field. https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/3278/GA27-2890-4_3278_Disp... (Page 73 of the PDF) As an aside, it's worth noting that moving between f…

I am trying to think of other older examples, but I know I have seen it before Workspaces/Chromebook:

The upstart adopts all the keyboard shortcuts of the dominant player. Then the existing userbase is comfortable... compatible, with the new and different software.

Then, slowly but surely, new novel shortcuts are introduced and you gradually find the “compatible” ones vanishing or conflicting or just glitched, until one day you’re no longer capable of using Apple or Word or Netscape or Excel.

I propose that IBM saw that coming, and fought against a future where IBM-trained users easily adopted someone else’s apps.

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

#215

Post by thunky »

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…

Good story but in fairness the "no" decision was usable for the next set of interns.

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

#216

Post by duxup »

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…

A coworker of mine got his first job at IBM after graduating from what was effectively an early version of a tech trade school when tech trade schools were not common.

He showed up to work at an IBM hardware factory in the US and as soon as everyone walked in the door they was called into a meeting that day. IBM announced they were all laid off immediately. IBM having almost no experience with layoffs to that point and still styling itself as a company you go to work at for life seemed to be legitimately unsure what to do.

So they gave everyone minimum 1 years pay, benefits, IBM actually assigned HR people who were VERY involved in trying to place people other places and paid many to relocate them, and what amounted to a 4 year scholarship too if they wanted to use it.

Dude had been there less than an hour and decided to just go back to school for 4 years ...

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

#217

Post by addaon »

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…

Yeah, the separate Enter and Return keys on Macs has always been nice.

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

#218

Post by relaxing »

bbatha wrote: post #213
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.

Interesting, IBM sales and consulting were infamous for sending in an army of blue suits in

That would have been in the 1980s.

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

#219

Post by 1718627440 »

Nition wrote: post #120
Henchman21 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’d need to install WSL2 first though!

It's a Linux subsystem for Windows so we'll call it Windows Subsystem For Linux.

It's not a part of Linux, so it can't be a Linux subsystem. It is a part of Windows, so it is indeed a Windows subsystem. Also it started/replaced a part of the NT kernel called a Subsystem, so it is called a Windows Subsystem.

I don't know where that strong objection to this particular name comes from. MS does do weird things with names, like with Live, .Net or CoPilot, but this isn't one of those, but in fact named quite sensible. Would you also object to the 'Linux kernel module for Android'?

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

#220

Post by 1718627440 »

kstrauser wrote: post #26
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?

No, it's that it's extremely challenging to insert a literal tab character into anything resembling a web form. You can configure your editor so that pressing the tab key inserts a tab character. Good luck with a web browser, or a UI where tab moves focus to the next control. The space bar basically always inserts a space character.

> The space bar basically always inserts a space character.

Except when it does page forward.

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