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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.
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...
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."
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.
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.
The concept probably has a real name, I call it first mover disadvantage. It is much easier to copy a mechanism than to invent it. So why even try? Every thing you have to spend real effort to invent is trivially copied the instant you try to sell it. And them copying it don't have to bear the nearly the R&D expenses you did. so it is trivial for them to sell this mechanism for less meaning you don't even get a fair slice of the pie.
So to try and limit this imbalance we invent a legal fiction, ownership, not of a physical thing, but the way it works. Not forever, but for 20 years you get ownership over those works.
Patents do have their problems, But I think the core idea is sound, create a registry of mechinisms, use this to provide economic protection to the inventor.
Cannot is maybe doing a lot there. There's plenty of usability features that aren't really obvious or apparent unless you look very closely. Ex: pinball machines have timed shots, but there's almost always a grace period so if you contact the ball with your flipper around when the timer hits zero and it makes the shot, chances are you'll get credit for it even though the timer expired. That's a usability feature most users won't ever notice. At WhatsApp, I would never send an S40 user a verification code where the 4th digit was 8, because if you got a text message with 123-890, s40 would turn -8 into an 8th note emoji; until today, probably 3 people knew that ... but it dramatically improved 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.
If I had gotten a patent on the 'avoid -8 in verification codes', then the technique would have been public for everyone to see. So publication for exclusivity / forced licensing is an exchange of value between society and the inventor. Of course, avoid -8 is pretty obvious, when someone testing the s40 client complains about getting an 8th note in their verification code message, you make a quick tweak to code selection to avoid sending those.
For an invention that must be disclosed to be used, society isn't really getting anything in return for exclusivity. Maybe promotion of progress, theoretically, I guess, in that whoever thinks of it first gets paid; leading more people to think about things?
But that’s not the criteria for granting a patent. It doesn’t have to be a stroke of genius. It can be something that many people could invent at the particular moment of the filing (as evidenced by many cases of near-simultaneous patent filings, like Daimler and Benz competing for the ICE in the 1880s). It just needs to be demonstrably novel.
I’m not saying tabbing back and forth through dialog fields qualifies, but then again it’s hard to place oneself in 1980.
IBMs earliest block mode terminals with field entry, including the 3270, predate the microprocessor. They were fully implemented with fixed hardware control.
That’s your opinion, but it’s not the spirit of the law. I’m personally fully against Intellectual Property, including for movies and music, for reasons that are obvious (public money is being spent aimlessly trying to prevent two private individuals from copying things that are copied by their very nature of being published - or trying to prevent people from using ideas that are contagious - what next, put a copyright on political ideas? on dance moves? on beautiful colors?) but that’s not the law.
> we would have gone thousands of years with no method
There are other methods: The 4 arrows. The tab method is much more efficient and easy to implement, but we would have gone with the 4-arrows-to-navigate-fields method.
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...
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...).
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?
On later generations of IBM terminal keyboard, you'll see | on the shift-1 position, and a separate key with the broken-bar (¦) symbol. For example, on this keyboard, the broken bar is below the backspace key along with the \ character. https://sharktastica.co.uk/image?id=qhTU8QvD
The reason for the two different types of bar/pipe characters, and why the original IBM PC keyboards only had the broken bar on the keyboard, involves a particularly arcane footnote of history relating to supporting the PL/I language on ASCII terminals: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/a-wunderbar-story/
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.
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.
so they spent seven layers of management escalating against their own standard: https://archive.org/details/ibmsj2703E/page/n13/mode/2up
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.
Lame.
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".
RIP /.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
(It's intended to allow video games that use standard OS controls to be controlled sanely with a gamepad.)
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.
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.
Great read
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
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.
(And yes I do miss those - with an external keyboard these get less painful but still don't work 100% like on a PC)
"I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous." - David Bradley (IBM), creator of the Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut key.
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.
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.
But yeah, I sometimes show that Sinofsky's blog entry as an example of difference.
Fucking microsoft can't delete my github account for 5 months already
Honestly, why should I even believe it?