I've actually witnessed a very large oil & gas company switch over from those old dos programs to a new win32 program, and to a man, every person who had any experience on the old system bitched about how much slower it was to get anything done.

Having worked on the system myself, they were right (this was as a noobie to both systems).

There is something to be said for a small, tight system.

Some time ago HN linked to a blog from a Norwegian tasked with mailing 3.5" floppies to doctors.

This because the doctors insisted on using a DOS based patient journal, as they could operate it completely by keyboard while maintaining a conversation with the patient.

I speculate that one reason for this is that DOS allowed each program to have full keyboard access, while Windows and other GUI has to reserve certain keys for managing the UI (switching between windows etc).

Thus what was earlier a series of single key presses now involves holding down a modifier for the duration. And that is if the developer even remembered to put in a hotkey for said action.

You don't need the Windows reserved keys for anything with an application. You could make a fully keyboard operable UI for an application on Windows.

It's just that software makers don't do it; most everyone thinks everyone loves to do things with mouse et al.

Do you happen to have the link to this blog handy? I'd be interested in reading it.

You got me digging, so here is the HN discussion about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10287889