The situation was not so different back then. My first paid job was in the late 80's. I had to do something about a system that was basically a lot of menus wr

The situation was not so different back then. My first paid job was in the late 80's. I had to do something about a system that was basically a lot of menus written in Oracle Forms running in terminals on SCO Unix or maybe Xenix. I was unbearable slow. Users had to wait 5+ seconds every time they pressed a key. And it was a nightmare to try to optimize it. But then I scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing using plain C and curses and system() calls to do the actual work. Hard-coding the menu hierarchy structure which nobody was changing anyway. That made the system very fast. The company was very surprised that navigating menus could be so fast.