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

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260505-00/?p=112298

by SeenNotHeard • 3 months ago

397 240 3 months ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

bobomonkey• 3 months ago

What did IBM want? Arrow keys?

kstrauser2• 3 months ago

Enter/return commonly used elsewhere.

cosmotic• 3 months ago

What would be 'submit' then?

MrDOS• 3 months ago

I'd never really thought about it before, but Enter to advance to the next field field and Ctrl + Enter to submit the whole form (which is the typical keyboard shortcut for submitting the form while a multi-line text input control has focus) does have a certain appeal to it.

raverbashing• 3 months ago

To me that sounds like the way MacOS avoids Home/End with alternative solutions that kinda work but are not great

(And yes I do miss those - with an external keyboard these get less painful but still don't work 100% like on a PC)

Terr_• 3 months ago

Possibly, OS/2 co-development started in 1985, which is the same year IBM released the a keyboard with arrow keys.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard

SoftTalker• 3 months ago

Weird because on the mainframe 3270 the tab key was used to move between fields, at least that is my recollection.

epx• 3 months ago

+1, always thought it was an IBM standard, move with TAB and commit the form with ENTER.

kibwen• 3 months ago

It's been ages since I used an IBM green screen but I seem to recall that in our application Tab did move between fields, but I think there were also function keys reserved for this purpose.

buggeryorkshire• 3 months ago

That's exactly my memory too, using a tab was second nature and it irked me when I went to gui apps with a mouse and the tab order was wrong, mainly with visual basic apps.

EvanAnderson• 3 months ago

I wonder about the midrange systems. I never used AS/400's, but I know they have the concept of a a "Field Exit" key separate from <ENTER>.

robocat2• 3 months ago

Correct. I found a PDF of the Operator's Guide. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028227

drob518• 3 months ago

So, what did IBM want to use instead?!?!

connorboyle• 3 months ago

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 view.

asdfman123• 3 months ago

I assume so. Obviously there are very different concerns if you're managing an organization with countless moving parts versus you want to build something for the user quickly.

deburo• 3 months ago

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

OhMeadhbh11• 3 months ago

You mean the Control key to the left of the 'A' key? That's already the control key.

daemin• 3 months ago

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

rwmj• 3 months ago

Maybe because it would compete with IBM mainframes / 3270 terminal emulators?

bruce5112• 3 months ago

Personally I don't like the tab key for field change.

Firstly it was a breaking change from dos. Dos programs used Enter. And enter meant you could capture numeric data using 1 hand, since the numeric keypad has an enter key.

That means left hand can stay on the (paper) source. Right hand types. People got fast at this. (Really fast). And this pattern lives on in some programs kline Excel).

Lots of people (ie my customers) hated needing both hands on the keyboard. Lots of our programs allowed mapping of enter=tab.

I should be clear. It's not the "name" of the key that matters, it's the location.

The dual-use of the key is just an annoyance we live with. Sometimes the key behaves as a navigator, but in other cases it behaves as a spacer. Daft. (Enter would have the same problem. )

The best solution (by far) would gave been to add another key to the keyboard. Preferably in the numeric key pad. We got lots of new keys in that era. Hindsight says we should have added a "move on" key at that time.

dark-star• 3 months ago

Dos programs used Enter.

I have used plenty of DOS programs back in the late 80s/early 90s, and I don't remember a single one that used "enter" to move between fields. Most of the time, "enter" closes the dialog. They all use TAB to move to the next field.

But maybe you're talking about even older software?

hylaride• 3 months ago

The way I interpreted it was that there was no complete "IBM" reason. I read it as "one person in the IBM bureaucracy stepped in and brought things to a halt, which highlights the cultural differences" considering it is a post about said differences.

munk-a• 3 months ago

If you're designing a text editor that's intended to run within a browser you need to fully break user expectations about the functionality of the tab key - there are two completely logical and intuitive roles it can serve in such an environment that are in conflict.

The same issue arises (with much higher frequency) with Enter and even in the modern world I'm sure we all have a pretty complex ruleset we've committed of when ctrl+crlf triggers a newline, or a message send and what the corresponding behaviors of a bare crlf and shift+crlf are.

In HN's editor shift+crlf and a bare crlf cause a newline creation and ctrl+crlf does nothing - but often times ctrl+crlf will trigger a form/message/whatever submission, shift+crlf often causes a raw newline insertion (even when in a form context) and then a bare crlf might do one - might do the other or might even do neither! Those are the common bindings but I have seen exceptions and inversions of bindings with shift+crlf causing form submission while requiring ctrl+crlf for raw newline insertion.

All this stuff is just super annoying and causes a lot of user friction (and for a long time MSFT's style guide was considered a seminal reference for best practices as ironic as they may seem to folks these days).

jmclnx• 3 months ago

Interesting, I wonder if the "TAB" argument was IBM at the time wanting screen input to work just like they did on mainframes ?

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.

ch_1235• 3 months ago

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 fields was important enough on IBM terminals that they had a dedicated "back tab" key located on the opposite end of the keyboard to the tab key. On the original IBM PC, they decided to combine both functions into a single key. As a result, the tab key on the classic PC keyboard features the symbols for both forwards tab and back tab on the same key, the back tab symbol being on top to indicate that you need to hold down shift to use that function.

EDIT: The 5250 series terminals used the terms "Field Advance" and "Field Backspace" instead of Tab and Back Tab, but otherwise they used the same symbol on the keys, and the keys were located in roughly the same position as the 3270 series. Reference: https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/5291/GA21-9409-0_5291_Disp...

SirFatty• 3 months ago

And this is a great example of why I read the comments on HN stories... thanks for the info!

RIP /.

ChuckMcM2• 3 months ago

Having worked at IBM, I would guess that using the tab key in this way was part of a patent they were pursuing and Microsoft's use would show this to be 'obvious' and thus not patentable. But that is just a guess.

In the 80's IBM had a whole class of high level technical people called "Systems Engineers" whose entire job description was to opine on the merits of any given system. Not write systems, not debug them, and certainly not to explain them, it was simply to opine "you're doing it wrong."

MoonWalk3• 3 months ago

Microsoft is suffering from the lack of such a group today; they're definitely doing it wrong, where "it" is pretty much everything... except pissing off users.

thaumasiotes4• 3 months ago

I would guess that using the tab key in this way was part of a patent they were pursuing and Microsoft's use would show this to be 'obvious' and thus not patentable.

Something that's bothered me about user-facing patents:

Let's assume that the idea of using a keyboard key to move between input fields in a software form is not obvious, and in fact is a brilliant stroke of genius the likes of which the world is not likely to see again. If that one guy hadn't been born, we would have gone thousands of years with no method, keyboard-based, mouse-based, or otherwise, of moving from one input field to another input field. Every piece of software would use nonconfigurable timers, and you'd just have to hope you could type fast enough.

I don't see what the hypothetical benefit of extending patent protection to this brilliant idea is supposed to be.

Say you're the company who comes up with the idea. You can benefit by including it in your product, where all your users can see it. In other words, the benefit you get from coming up with this idea is that you can publish it for the world to see, and that's the only way you can benefit from it. A usability feature that your users cannot use or know about doesn't increase usability.

Even though the idea isn't obvious, the implementation is. If you disclose your brilliant idea, everyone will copy it and your advantage in the marketplace will be transitory.

So... what is the purpose of giving you a patent? That cripples the marketplace, but it fails to realize the benefit of patents, publication. Publication necessarily had to happen anyway.

FartinMowler• 3 months ago

What?!?! I was an IBM Systems Engineer in the late 1980s / early 1990s and that was nothing like my job description.

rbanffy8• 3 months ago

I would guess that using the tab key in this way was part of a patent they were pursuing and Microsoft's use would show this to be 'obvious' and thus not patentable.

IBM insisting it not to be tab wouldn’t make sense. Microsoft was working for them and the programs should adhere to the CUA (Common User Access) standard.

MoonWalk3• 3 months ago

Also conspicuously missing from the story is what key IBM DID want to use. I mean... that's the first question you'd ask!

Lame.

Tempest1981• 3 months ago

Ctrl-F6 ?

yndoendo• 3 months ago

It looks like it they wanted to use their existing special field management keys (field advance and field backspace) with tab being a different user experience. [0] Document does even use the word "Tab". "Field Backspace" seems to duplicate "Home" key usage under some conditions.

To be fair, Microsoft & Bill Gates are bad at quality user experience. "Ctrl+F" differs through their applications.

[0] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibm525xGA2onDisplaySys...

*Edited.

The more I think of it the current TAB (SHIFT+TAB) key should of been used for entry navigation navigation only while the white space tab should of been something such as "SHIFT+SPACE".

Animats• 3 months ago

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 numeric fields. That was all done by the terminal. When the form was filled in, the user pressed ENTER, and the completed form was sent to the mainframe as one transaction. This approach let one mainframe service huge numbers of terminals. The user never experienced delays while typing and could type at full speed, often without looking.

PCs didn't have that usage model. The PC crowd was thinking "typewriter". One of the first terminals for home computers was called the "TV Typewriter".

Web forms do have that model, but with less consistency.

[1] https://sharktastica.co.uk/resources/images/model_bs/themk_1...

ch_1235• 3 months ago

Nitpick: The terminology used by IBM on the 3270 family (including the 3277 whose keyboard you shared) was "Tab" and "Back tab", not "Next field" and "Previous field".

jll29• 3 months ago

The SAP application model is such a form-based model (no surprise given that all five co-founders of SAP were ex-IBM consultants that were fired for moonlighting - specifically, for writing a payroll software for chemical giant ICI in assembler on ICI's mainframe in an extended night action...).

SAP call their forms "dynpros" (dynamic programms), and the reslting interactive mode of processing "realtime/dialog programming" as opposed to "batch processing". This all looked very IBM 3270-"inspired" (and so was the SAP logo made up of IBM blue with the well-known stripes...).

dylan6043• 3 months ago

It looks really strange to have 3 keys right next to each other all pointed in the same direction.

As another head scratcher, what is the shift-1 symbol? The exclamation point appears to be the shift next to one of the 3 left arrow keys, but I'm also unfamiliar with the regular unshifted key. Anyone familiar with these?

shrubble• 3 months ago

Note as well that a screenful of user-entered checked/constrained text, meant for some form of database query or insert, meant just one interrupt to the mainframe CPU; and all the info was there in an easy to parse format. Very low use of resources.

jasomill6• 3 months ago

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 message, dismissing a dialog box, completing input into a particular spreadsheet cell, editable filename, text object in a drawing program, etc., or whether I need to copy/paste a line break from another application because no such shortcut exists at all.

ivankelly• 3 months ago

Arrow keys are giving swastika vibes, which I guess fits given IBM’s history

sedatk• 3 months ago

From what I remember, there were two "Enter/Return" keys on IBM 3270 terminals. One was the regular "Return" key we have today, which just advanced to the next field, and didn't submit the form. There was also another "Enter" key where the Right Ctrl key is today, and that submitted the form. So, I presume, instead of being against Tab key, IBM might be against "Return" to be the form submit key as people who use 3270 would expect it to advance to the next field.

And that was true for many DOS programs. Pressing Return would just go to the next field, not submit the form. That was one of the things that needed some getting used to on Windows.

ch_1235• 3 months ago

Your memory is correct, and it's interesting to note that on the IBM terminal keyboards, the Enter key was marked "Enter", and the return/new line key was marked "↵". On the classic IBM PC keyboards such as the Model M, the Enter key is marked "↵ Enter". I believe IBM chose this to convey that the Enter key on the PC was both an "Enter" _and_ "Return" key in one. As you say though - individual applications got to chose what that meant in practice, leading to inconsistent behavior.

logickkk1• 3 months ago

Funnily enough, IBM had already published this. CUA explicitly says tab and backtab move between fields.

so they spent seven layers of management escalating against their own standard: https://archive.org/details/ibmsj2703E/page/n13/mode/2up

mrandish2• 3 months ago

Not being familiar with the term CUA, I looked it up and TIL something (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access). Since the doc you linked is dated 1988 and CUA was a brand new thing circa OS/2 (at least in traditional IBM timescales), the apparent inconsistency might be down to the massive scale of IBM in those days and organizational propagation delay.

Another factor could be still-reverberating echoes of the likely political battles around something as broad and far-reaching as CUA. I can only imagine the quiet boardroom battles won and lost fighting over CUA between different factions across all of IBM's kingdoms, divisions and principalities.

mrandish2• 3 months ago

IBM was consistent with their keyboard nomenclature across multiple products, and the 3270 series mainframe terminals used the Tab key

While it seems odd in light of IBM's usual adherence to corporate norms across business units, having read a couple different books on the origins of the PC at IBM, it may be related to the entire PC unit in Boca being an extraordinary aberration outside the norm for IBM. Despite seeming hopelessly corporate to the Microsoft team, the Boca IBMers were considered a "Rebel Unit" inside IBM - when they were considered at all, since the vast majority of IBM wasn't even aware of it.

Due to being started virtually overnight (in IBM timescales), running incredibly fast and only existing thanks to Thomas Watson, Jr. himself overruling his lieutenants to approve such a "skunk works", Boca didn't have nearly the level of oversight, coordination or control as an effort that size normally would. In the early days Boca ran largely outside normal reporting channels and when they'd try to source tech or components from other parts of IBM, had to sometimes clarify that they were in fact part of IBM.

ButlerianJihad3• 3 months ago

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.

donatj2• 3 months ago

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 that being a pain in the butt. For instance, try getting a tab character into the text area on Hacker News

INTPenis2• 3 months ago

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?

jimbokun• 3 months ago

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.

kstrauser2• 3 months ago

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.

ville• 3 months ago

No, the point was that pressing the Tab key often does something else than inserts the tab character. Moves focus to the next input field, for example.

sam_lowry_2• 3 months ago

BTW, Douglas Crockford had an interesting argument in favour of spaces, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En8Ubs2k1O8

IshKebab• 3 months ago

No he's saying if you're trying to write code in an edit box in a web browser (for example) and you press tab, instead of inserting a tab character it will move the focus to the next input field.

Bullshit reasoning though, because even people who use spaces for indentation don't do it by hammering the space bar - they also press the tab key. And of course in modern browsers we can give tab the expected behaviour.

The only logic I've ever heard for using spaces for indentation that actually makes sense and I vaguely agree with, is that lots of programmers do not give a shit about formatting code and even using spaces properly is often a bit too much for them.

That doesn't matter so much if you have an autoformatter though, so with the exception of Go I don't know why modern languages with widely used autoformatters don't use tabs.

bnjms2• 3 months ago

Tab key is both a control character moving the cursor to the next input and also an input representing the tab character as you see in a text editor.

Now that im thinking about it I’m convinced capslock would have been superior next field key and alt+capslock to be used for toggling capslock. But it’s not obvious to me capslock [e: must be] seen by the OS. It could be changed on the keyboards themselves.

Someone• 3 months ago

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.

The main counter argument is that users have different preferences for the amount of indentation, so giving them control over that, just as they (nowadays) have control over the font used and window width, is a good idea.

The tongue-in-cheek counter argument is that fixed-width spaces are preferable over ‘normal’ spaces. They also give you more control over indentation, allowing, for example, mixing usage of THREE-PER-EM SPACE (https://unicode-explorer.com/c/2004) for indentation with FIGURE SPACE (https://unicode-explorer.com/c/2007) for right-aligning numbers.

bigibas1232• 3 months ago

Brendan Eich was making a point about the tab key also being used to switch to different text fields and buttons. This makes it difficult to type in certain applications. A space doesn't have that issue.

About your point of tab being represented different on different systems: It will always be ascii 9, how it's draw does differ between text editors but I consider that one of it's strengths for programming. Everyone can configure what an indent looks like for them, it makes reading code easier.

sltkr• 3 months ago

Control-shift-u, 9, space/enter, works on most Linux systems.

To explain: control-shift-u allows entering a Unicode character by its hexadecimal code. This presumably depends on the Input Method Editor (IME) in use, which is something I've never fully understood, but this seems to work widely across different desktop environments (Xfce, KDE) and display servers (Xorg, Wayland).

zzo38computer• 3 months ago

It might be reasonable to have a separate key for "tab" vs "next field", as well as separate key for "line break" vs "send". (But, tab and line break are not applicable for all contexts.)

However, it might also be reasonable to have a key or key combination (some programs use ^V) to enter control characters as data rather than as commands.

It might also be a consideration when designing a new computer (which does not have to be the same as existing ones); I had thought about such things and may make such a consideration.

dmonitor• 3 months ago

Put it where the capslock key currently goes. Not sure what purpose it serves these days.

17186274405• 3 months ago

as well as separate key for "line break" vs "send"

There is: Return vs. Enter. Sadly there are not many OSs and programs that honor this. I'm personally also sad about Scroll Lock. It would be useful, some programs even reinvent it, on Firefox it's basically F7.

OhMeadhbh11• 3 months ago

There's also the fact that no one seems to have tab stops set the same way.

LeoPanthera• 3 months ago

That's a feature, not a bug.

topham• 3 months ago

The fact that most people think the Tab key is the correct choice is a perfect example of why it was not.

It had a purpose, and it got hijacked and made its actual purpose more difficult to use.

It's not dissimilar to Apples initial Touch Bar and then removing the Escape key.

Average user might never use that key; average developer doesn't got long without using that key for its purpose.

rbanffy8• 3 months ago

When you type a table on a typewriter you use the tab to advance to the next column (how many you have depends on the typewriter - you often had margins and one or two tabs). In typewriters, tab doesn’t have a specific width and you don’t have tab stops at every 8 columns. At least on the ones I have here.

tuetuopay3• 3 months ago

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 have with enter (somewhat because there's a mix of shift+enter, alt+enter and cmd+enter). All of shift/alt/ctrl tab are usually also hijacked.

aequitas• 3 months ago

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?

Now that I think about it, I think I haven't hit the tab key for indenting code in ages. I use cmd+] and cmd+[ to indent/unindent blocks of code in my default editor and doing so habitual for single lines now as well that I have 'unlearned' the tab key. For the few occasions I'm in a editor that does not have this keybinding I am actually hitting spacebar a few times as it is more predictable than whatever amount of spaces using the tab key would give me (or if it gives me a tab instead of spaces) and me having to dance around with the backspace key as well. Some editors I think use tab/shift-tab to indent/unindent blocks/lines of code, but not insert a tab. But then you are having 2 modes for the same key depending on the context.

registeredcorn• 3 months ago

it sills maddens me there's no somewhat universal tab-entry in OSes like we have with enter

That's a good point!

Were it up to me, I'd probably say something like: Ctrl+`, or maybe ` followed by escape, or something like that. Maybe one of the function keys? Eh...most if not all of those have been hijacked to mean various inane and stupid things too. :/

Hmm...oh! How about: Caps Lock+Shift ? I'm using an ergonomic keyboard, but I think the button press would still work pretty easily. I assume most styles of keyboard would have both, so it wouldn't lock people out if they are writing in a different language, either.

Rendello• 3 months ago

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...

BrendanEich• 3 months ago

Who "he"? I :set et (expand tabs) in vim :-P.

amelius• 3 months ago

CTRL+I?

lopis• 3 months ago

I've ran into an elusive bug in VSCode where sometimes pressing tag moves focus to the next focusable instead of adding a tab/spaces. It's infuriating, and the only solution is restarting VSCode.

guelo• 3 months ago

Interesting to think how Microsoft is today's Ibm having adopted that beurocratic culture and deep hierarchical org.

wk_end• 3 months ago

I don't think even modern-day Microsoft is anywhere near as bureaucratic as IBM, but yeah - it seems almost inevitable that as a software company grows it'll lose an "undisciplined hacker" culture and become stuffier, for better or worse.

justsomehnguy3• 3 months ago

It's the size. You can't avoid it and you need a very clera vision, time, will and most important - trusted people to keep the org lean.

But yeah, I sometimes show that Sinofsky's blog entry as an example of difference.

jmkni• 3 months ago

The latest in a long line of articles where "Raymond Chen" is my first thought before even opening it, just based on the title

Great read

ale42• 3 months ago

Same here... actually I think most HN submissions with an interesting title and coming from "microsoft.com" are his.

crumpled• 3 months ago

This article seems to just be a dig at IBM without bringing any receipts or adding any substance. "A colleague told me that they said..."

Honestly, why should I even believe it?

OhMeadhbh11• 3 months ago

The thing I find funny here is that MicroSoft in the 80s and early 90s was a scrappy bunch of hackers trying to get something out the door. But over time they've sort of become IBM. Based on the way things have progressed...

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.

vincent-manis• 3 months ago

So who became Xerox? (i.e., brilliant ideas, thrown away at the corporate level)

xerox13ster• 3 months ago

They died of Fatal Neglect because no one gives a shit about brilliant ideas anymore.

OhMeadhbh11• 3 months ago

Xerox was a weird mix. Insightful enough to fund PARC, but blind enough to not understand the computer market. There's a section in "Fumbling the Future" describing how Xerox higher-ups could not figure out why people thought the Alto, with it's bit-mapped / mouse-based interface was in any way different from SDS/XDS minis with a set of front panel switches and serial terminals hanging off the back.

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.

SwellJoe• 3 months ago

I have such a long history of thinking of Microsoft as the Big Bad in tech, that it's funny to think of them as the young upstart that's just coming into their own and standing up to the big guys for the first time. If it was early enough for folks to be arguing about what keys to use for functions, it must have been 1985, which means Microsoft was just coming to the end of their time needing to satisfy IBM in order to survive/thrive.

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.

OhMeadhbh11• 3 months ago

I think we should connect game controllers to all machines so the arrow buttons move you between fields, the 'A' key takes you up a level (in hierarchical menus), the 'B' key takes you into a subordinate menu. So to move between fields, you type some data, then take your hands off the keyboard, pick up the game controller, hit the right or left buttons, then put your hands back on the keyboard. It should make you SO much more productive!

coldpie• 3 months ago

Check this out :) https://github.com/madewokherd/xalia#default-gamepad-control...

(It's intended to allow video games that use standard OS controls to be controlled sanely with a gamepad.)

ceayo• 3 months ago

That's awesome!

Joker_vD3• 3 months ago

What a terrific idea! You totally should file a patent. Meanwhile, we'll have to use the next best thing: the mouse.

OhMeadhbh11• 3 months ago

I'm patenting the idea of adding game controller buttons to a mouse and I'm listing you as a co-inventor.

watersb• 3 months ago

IBM CUA FTW LOL

AbbeFaria• 3 months ago

the Microsofties viewing their IBM colleagues as mired in pointless bureaucracy and the IBM folks viewing Microsofties as undisciplined hackers.

I work at MSFT, this made me chuckle hard. Microsoft must have been a very different company back then, because now I find myself and my colleagues mired in pointless bureaucracy via endless meetings, AI mandates, promotion theatre and the list goes on. I am decently paid but the bureaucracy is soul destroying.

torben-friis• 3 months ago

I've had to work with oracle people this very year and had the same style of interactions, funnily enough. They required constant input from higher ups in our mostly flat org, no matter how many times an annoyed VP had to email a "I agree with whatever my people say".

jonathanstrange• 3 months ago

I find keyboards fascinating because they have many anachronistic elements and design flaws, yet nobody outside of elitist mechanical keyboard circles seems to be willing to fix them. Everybody seems to just think "whatever, gotta live with it." Why do they still have an extra large Caps Lock key in such a prominent position? What does ScrLk key on my keyboard do? Why is there an Ins key when practically every text edit field is in insert mode anyway? How often do you actually use the Pause key and what does it do?

17186274405• 3 months ago

Why do they still have an extra large Caps Lock key in such a prominent position?

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.

RetroTechie• 3 months ago

yet nobody outside of elitist mechanical keyboard circles seems to be willing to fix them.

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.

Dwedit• 3 months ago

Also somewhat related to Microsoft and IBM:

"I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous." - David Bradley (IBM), creator of the Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut key.

trollbridge• 3 months ago

CUA 87 (released in 1987) used the tab key to advance between fields unless there was a dedicated Next Field key. CUA 89 was likewise.

emaccumber• 3 months ago

xenadu02• 3 months ago

IBM is also the reason MS-DOS doesn't support "-" for options and why it doesn't have devices in the "\DEV" directory on all drives. Support for "/" as path separator survived though!

Many MS folks used Xenix and were fans of Unix and very early DOS had SWITCHCHAR and AVAILDEV config.sys options for these things. But AFAIK IBM threw an absolute fit about it and forced their removal.

The DEV issue is specially annoying because DOS 1 didn't have directories - thus it could not have been much of a compatibility problem. But instead DOS/Windows is stuck being unable to support creating files named "CON" or "COM1" because it assumes device files exist in all directories.

spc476• 3 months ago

Microsoft never removed it for MS-DOS. It just undocumented the calls required for this for years.

jnpnj2• 3 months ago

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.

esafak• 3 months ago

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

jnpnj2• 3 months ago

Not really, I knew it was radically strange in its philosophy.

AndrewStephens• 3 months ago

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 customer interaction so they didn't think it was a big deal.

Months later, just before the end of the internship, they received a reply. Their manager had forwarded their request up the chain of command and the email had the full quoted history. Their request had been bumped up 4 successive layers in the London office, then across to the US headquarters where it continued its upwards trajectory, finally alighting on the desk of a VP who, after thanking them for bring the issue to his attention, rendered an carefully considered opinion.

The whole process had taken weeks, presumably as each person in the hierarchy debated whether they had the authority to tackle such a weighty issue.

The email had then been inexplicably bounced back DOWN the chain one link at a time, back across the Atlantic Ocean, and through the local office, down to the suit-bound interns, again weeks later, who by this stage only had days left at the internship.

The answer was no.

andyjohnson0• 3 months ago

I interned at an IBM R&D site in Winchester (UK) for a year in 1988-89 and none of us interns wore suits, or even ties. I don't recall many of the f/t IBMers doing so either. It was pretty informal really.

(Not disputing your story, just providing a different perspective.)

jiggawatts2• 3 months ago

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 'no'.

The manager in that office you worked in most likely made a decision themselves and didn't punt it up the hierarchy, and hence nobody told him 'no'.

The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.

PS: It's hilarious to see this effect play out as a consultant, because often I deal with different "randomly" selected subsets of the same organisation and the difference in their day-to-day can be stark. It just boils down to which managers take individual responsibility, and which regularly beg for permission to do their job. "No."

eps• 3 months ago

In the late 90s I moved from one country to another. As a part of a job hunt I applied to the local IBM office, because I had some OS/2 mileage. Then promptly got three offers from other places, accepted one and completely forgot about the IBM application.

Not 8 (eight) months later I got a call from their HR saying they'd like to interview me next Thursday. And then they got completely flabergasted when I said I was no longer interested. Don't know what they were smoking, but they were exceptionally full of themselves... while not even offering a good pay.

bartread• 3 months ago

When I went to a grad jobs fair in 1998 or so IBM were offering at least 25% less than any other company I spoke to, and 40% less than the best paying roles.

The only company they were on par with was Arthur Andersen, who were offering around £15k for trainee accountant roles, but you know how fast those salaries go up once you’re qualified and start to progress.

jjwiseman• 3 months ago

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

jasomill6• 3 months ago

Should have gone to First CityWide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXDxNCzUspM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg

protocolture• 3 months ago

I have a few of these.

I asked to be excepted from a contract condition giving IBM first pick on any IP I develop in my own time.

Keep in mind, I was working in one of their technical support call centres. I had no access to IBM proprietary information, I had no role in developing it, I was a complete non risk on this front. I had more access to customer systems, no access to RED or BLUE networks, just an IBM lotus notes account I could use to slowly download information from HR.

Everyone I could physically speak to looked at my request and went, hey that's a really reasonable request.

It took 6 weeks for the first no to come back, my direct manager, whose stats I was apparently holding in place, apparently tried to intercede, adding 2 further weeks for a review. The answer was still no. This had apparently gone up through one line of reporting across to the US, branched out into legal and came back down that path. It was crazy.

So I left, so I could work on a small software project with a friend without risking IBM having an interest in it.

Another one. The HR forms were all written in the early 80s and digitised sometime in the 00s. Our team, not being customer facing, was super diverse. I know there was an attempt to try and get the HR forms updated to recognise other gender/pronoun combinations. This took like 12 weeks to be reviewed, and I think the eventual no was based entirely on the fact that no one wanted to try and figure out whose job it was to update the forms. Our team was full of LGBT people, and retention of them appeared to be critical. Hard no.

Also, our sexual harrassment training came on tape (in the year of our lord two thousand and ten) and implied that it was the updated version, previously it might have been vinyl or something.

cybercatgurrl2• 3 months ago

i never want to work at IBM. it sounds like hell

laacz• 3 months ago

This sent me down a rabbit hole. In the US, the PIIA effectively is the law - your employer gets to decide whether your side project "relates to their business." In the EU (where I am) it's basically: not on a work laptop, not on work hours? Yours.

I'm fine here :)

atl_tom• 3 months ago

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.

CSSer• 3 months ago

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

bbatha• 3 months ago

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

quietsegfault• 3 months ago

Was? Is.

thunky• 3 months ago

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

duxup• 3 months ago

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 ...

alfiedotwtf• 3 months ago

If you have ever used Xero.com to fill out timesheets you’ll personally know that they adhere to IBM’s strict tab standards

K7PJP• 3 months ago

I've been a Mac user for 30+ years, but I love Raymond Chen's historical posts.

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.

sowbug• 3 months ago

I can't do anything about Apple's culture, but it's been long enough that I doubt anyone would mind if I shared a story.

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!

DocTomoe• 3 months ago

This reads so much like a story in Gates' 'The Road Ahead' about IBM refusing graphical printing because some of their printers just couldn't, while at the same time this iteration makes no sense at all and is a bit weak on the details (e.g. not giving a rationale), that I wonder if someone linkedin^1 this. With respect to Raymond Chen.

[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'.

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

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