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IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
- Dwedit 5mo agoAlso 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.
- bobomonkey 5mo agoWhat did IBM want? Arrow keys?
- kstrauser 5mo agoEnter/return commonly used elsewhere.
- cosmotic 5mo agoWhat would be 'submit' then?
- CamperBob2 5mo agoEnter/return on the 'Submit' button, I suppose. The rationale may have been "Start at the beginning of the form, keep hitting Enter after filling in each field, and it will submit itself when you're done."
- drivers99 5mo agoSome terminal software would use a function key that would be labelled "Execute". You'd usually have a template to put over the function keys to tell you what does what.
- MrDOS 5mo agoI'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.
- bsimpson 5mo agoThe overloading of return to either send a message or add a newline has become really annoying since chat apps (and then now AI) have become popular. You have to keep a mental context of whether you need to hold shift before you press return. See also: every message I've ever sent that ended with I' because I fat-fingered the ' key while typing a contraction.
- tracker1 5mo agoShift+Enter will usually enter a newline in a message without triggering send... At least that's the convention used most of the time. No guarantees on specific applications, just my own experience with this.
- Joker_vD 5mo agoSome applications annoyingly use the opposite convention: Shift+Enter is what commits the entered text, while plain Enter inserts a newline.
- tracker1 5mo agoYeah, it's not always consistent... hell, google voice's sms in the web app will take shift+enter but fail and just submit half the time anyway.
- Joker_vD 5mo agoTerminal keyboards generally used to have two separate ENTER (submit the form to the mainframe) and RETURN (insert a line break) keys. I mean, even the original 101-key PC keyboard has them: the RETURN key above the right Shift, and the ENTER key of the numpad.
- raverbashing 5mo agoTo 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_ 5mo agoPossibly, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard
- SoftTalker 5mo agoWeird because on the mainframe 3270 the tab key was used to move between fields, at least that is my recollection.
- buggeryorkshire 5mo agoThat'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.
- epx 5mo ago+1, always thought it was an IBM standard, move with TAB and commit the form with ENTER.
- kibwen 5mo agoIt'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.
- EvanAnderson 5mo agoI 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>.
- robocat 5mo agoCorrect. I found a PDF of the Operator's Guide. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028227
- drob518 5mo agoSo, what did IBM want to use instead?!?!
- connorboyle 5mo agoA 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 5mo agoI 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 5mo agoI now imagine a world where CAPSLOCK is used as "select the next input" and TAB as the character.
- rwmj 5mo agoMaybe because it would compete with IBM mainframes / 3270 terminal emulators?
- bruce511 5mo agoPersonally 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.
- jmclnx 5mo agoInteresting, 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ch_123 5mo agoI 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_Display_Station_Operators_Guide_Feb84.pdf 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_Display_Operators_Guide_198212.pdf https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/5291/GA21-9409-0_5291_Disp...
- SirFatty 5mo agoAnd this is a great example of why I read the comments on HN stories... thanks for the info! RIP /.
- ChuckMcM 5mo agoHaving 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."
- MoonWalk 5mo agoMicrosoft 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.
- donatj 5mo agoAs 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
- INTPenis 5mo agoNon 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 5mo agoLiterally 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- kccqzy 5mo agoIt is Control-Q Control-I. Control-Q is the quoted insert function, and Control-I is the traditional teletype way of typing a tab 0x09 (just like Control-C in a terminal results in 0x03 when not in a cooked mode). I only found this because I am an Emacs user and I instinctively tried Control-Q first (because many other key bindings like C-f or C-b work). The Control-I bit is a guess that worked. I cannot imagine a non-technical user knowing how to insert a tab character in Safari.
- Waterluvian 5mo ago
- guelo 5mo agoInteresting to think how Microsoft is today's Ibm having adopted that beurocratic culture and deep hierarchical org.
- wk_end 5mo agoI 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.
- justsomehnguy 5mo agoIt'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 5mo agoThe 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 5mo agoSame here... actually I think most HN submissions with an interesting title and coming from "microsoft.com" are his.
- crumpled 5mo agoThis 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?
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agoThe 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 5mo agoSo who became Xerox? (i.e., brilliant ideas, thrown away at the corporate level)
- xerox13ster 5mo agoThey died of Fatal Neglect because no one gives a shit about brilliant ideas anymore.
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agoXerox 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 5mo agoI 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.
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agoI 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 5mo agoCheck this out :) https://github.com/madewokherd/xalia#default-gamepad-controls 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 5mo agoThat's awesome!
- Joker_vD 5mo agoWhat a terrific idea! You totally should file a patent. Meanwhile, we'll have to use the next best thing: the mouse.
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agoI'm patenting the idea of adding game controller buttons to a mouse and I'm listing you as a co-inventor.
- watersb 5mo agoIBM CUA FTW LOL
- tryauuum 5mo ago[flagged]
- AbbeFaria 5mo agothe 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 5mo agoI'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 5mo agoI 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?
- 1718627440 5mo 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 5mo 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.
- trollbridge 5mo agoCUA 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 5mo ago`
- xenadu02 5mo agoIBM 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 5mo agoMicrosoft never removed it for MS-DOS. It just undocumented the calls required for this for years.
- jnpnj 5mo agoI 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.
- AndrewStephens 5mo agoIBM 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 5mo agoI 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.)
- jiggawatts 5mo agoI 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."
- alfiedotwtf 5mo agoIf you have ever used Xero.com to fill out timesheets you’ll personally know that they adhere to IBM’s strict tab standards
- K7PJP 5mo agoI'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 5mo agoI 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 5mo agoThis 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'.
- karthikeyjoshi 5mo ago[dead]