9 ms·

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 5mo ago
Ctrl-F6 ?
- OhMeadhbh 5mo ago
  Shift Ctrl F6
yndoendo 5mo 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_ibm525xGA2onDisplaySystemFunctionsReferenceManualM_8040964/mode/2up 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".
- MoonWalk 5mo ago
  "To be fair, Microsoft & Bill Gates are bad at quality user experience." In some ways. Gates deserves never-ending enmity for plaguing us with backslashes in paths. But in others, Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s. "Would of?"
  - rbanffy 5mo ago
    > Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s. There is no universe where that is true.
    - badsectoracula 5mo ago
      There is: this one. Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.
      - rbanffy 5mo ago
        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 the apps launched as applications, but that's what the implementation looked like from what I investigated back then. Unfortunately, the idea was seemingly abandoned almost immediately. I would love to have such views on top of a user-space file system keeping messages, address books, and calendars in sync.
        ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
        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.
        badsectoracula 5mo ago
        I meant UI stuff like the desktop metaphor (Macintosh also had one but Win95's approach was more popular and mimicked in other environments), the start menu, the taskbar, etc, some newly introduced controls like tabs (i think OS/2 had tab-like controls/containers but they worked differently to those in Win95 and nowadays pretty much all tabs work like in Win95).
      - 5mo ago
- canucker2016 5mo ago
  Not sure the case that the parent refers to, but there's a good reason that CTRL-F in the Win95/Exchange Mail client and Outlook will invoke the Forward email message command. It goes back to what is the common action that the user would perform in the app. Forwarding an email is more common that Finding text in an email - at least to Billg. see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=503 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...

Tempest1981 5mo ago

Ctrl-F6 ?

OhMeadhbh 5mo ago
Shift Ctrl F6

yndoendo 5mo 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_ibm525xGA2onDisplaySystemFunctionsReferenceManualM_8040964/mode/2up 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".

MoonWalk 5mo ago
"To be fair, Microsoft & Bill Gates are bad at quality user experience." In some ways. Gates deserves never-ending enmity for plaguing us with backslashes in paths. But in others, Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s. "Would of?"
- rbanffy 5mo ago
  > Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s. There is no universe where that is true.
  - badsectoracula 5mo ago
    There is: this one. Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.
    - rbanffy 5mo ago
      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 the apps launched as applications, but that's what the implementation looked like from what I investigated back then. Unfortunately, the idea was seemingly abandoned almost immediately. I would love to have such views on top of a user-space file system keeping messages, address books, and calendars in sync.
      - ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
        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.
      - badsectoracula 5mo ago
        I meant UI stuff like the desktop metaphor (Macintosh also had one but Win95's approach was more popular and mimicked in other environments), the start menu, the taskbar, etc, some newly introduced controls like tabs (i think OS/2 had tab-like controls/containers but they worked differently to those in Win95 and nowadays pretty much all tabs work like in Win95).
    - 5mo ago
canucker2016 5mo ago
Not sure the case that the parent refers to, but there's a good reason that CTRL-F in the Win95/Exchange Mail client and Outlook will invoke the Forward email message command. It goes back to what is the common action that the user would perform in the app. Forwarding an email is more common that Finding text in an email - at least to Billg. see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=503 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...