To illustrate: In a DOS or terminal interface, a date field usually expected a certain format, made that format obvious in the UI, and you'd type the date with

To illustrate: In a DOS or terminal interface, a date field usually expected a certain format, made that format obvious in the UI, and you'd type the date with probably 6 keystrokes (numbers) (and it'd probably jump the focus right to the next field if you needed to enter more). And likewise, good software would find a reasonable way to fit everything possible on one screen. With 'modern' web-based business software, most of them implement a date field with a pop-up mousing widget. You may or may not be "allowed" to type at all, or it may not be obvious how to, and you might need 47 mouse clicks and 15 seconds to enter a DOB in the 1970s. And screens are usually not laid carefully out at all, so even with small amounts of info on the screen, there may be plenty of whitespace, necessitating scrolling back and forth constantly. A phone number field, likewise, may throw errors for using or not using the "expected" punctuation. Etc. Stuff like that would be considered an absolute failure in the old text interfaces but it's the norm now that UIs are clunky and inefficient. PS: None of this would be difficult in the web stack, it seems like the "UI/UX" designers (when they even exist) care exclusively about aesthetics.