Re:Canon Cat
by lproven on Sunday February 21, 2021 @07:14PM
(#26218788)
This is true.
I was doing PC tech support in 1988-1992 -- the era when the PC world went from MS-DOS to Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. (And a few weirdos, like me, ran OS/2 2, because Linux wasn't ready yet.)
I used to support, for instance...
• WordStar (3/4, Express and 2000)
• WordPerfect
• Ashton-Tate MultiMate
• IBM DisplayWrite
• MS Word for DOS
... on almost a daily basis, plus lots more occasionally: LocoScript, VolksWriter, PC Write, Samna Executive, and more.
Every one had a totally different user interface. Every keystroke, every menu -- if it had menus; lots didn't -- every status bar, with no similarities.
There was one key -- one -- that almost everyone respected: F1 for Help. Except WordPerfect, where it was F3.
Then IBM introduced a standard called Common User Access, soon after the Mac started kicking IBM's backside in user-friendliness.
CUA mandated that all apps should have a menu bar, at the top of the screen. (Lotus 1-2-3 and MS apps put it at the bottom, before.) It should have options called:
File -- for loading and saving. (Previously, MS called this "Transfer". Lotus called it "Workspace". WordPerfect didn't call it anything but it was on F7, or Shift-F7, or Ctrl-F7, or Alt-F7, or Shift-Ctrl-F7 (etc) depending on what you wanted to do.
Edit -- for editing: cut, copy, paste, search, replace, etc.. (Mostly not even a menu before, just hotkeys.)
View -- for controlling viewing options: text mode, graphics mode, colour, show formatting codes, whatever.
And a bunch of others, but all had to be 1 word only, with a unique letter to open the menu with the Alt key.
The last had to be Help.
And so on. It mandated a standard, borrowing heavily from the Mac HCI guide to do it. And amazingly, it mostly caught on. MS followed it for Windows, mostly, and after Windows 3.0 DOS app vendors found it beneficial to make their clunky old DOS apps at least look and work vaguely like their Windows apps.
Ironically, MS itself had to change more than most. MS Word 3, 4 and 5 were nothing even vaguely like CUA. To load a file in them, you pressed Esc to open the menu (2 lines at the bottom of the screen), T for Transfer then L for Load.
After CUA, in Word 5.5 (a free download now, if you want to try it out -- works well under DOSemu in Linux), this was replaced by Alt-F for File, then O for Open.
I was doing PC tech support in 1988-1992 -- the era when the PC world went from MS-DOS to Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. (And a few weirdos, like me, ran OS/2 2, because Linux wasn't ready yet.)
I used to support, for instance...
• WordStar (3/4, Express and 2000)
• WordPerfect
• Ashton-Tate MultiMate
• IBM DisplayWrite
• MS Word for DOS
... on almost a daily basis, plus lots more occasionally: LocoScript, VolksWriter, PC Write, Samna Executive, and more.
Every one had a totally different user interface. Every keystroke, every menu -- if it had menus; lots didn't -- every status bar, with no similarities.
There was one key -- one -- that almost everyone respected: F1 for Help. Except WordPerfect, where it was F3.
Then IBM introduced a standard called Common User Access, soon after the Mac started kicking IBM's backside in user-friendliness.
CUA mandated that all apps should have a menu bar, at the top of the screen. (Lotus 1-2-3 and MS apps put it at the bottom, before.) It should have options called:
File -- for loading and saving. (Previously, MS called this "Transfer". Lotus called it "Workspace". WordPerfect didn't call it anything but it was on F7, or Shift-F7, or Ctrl-F7, or Alt-F7, or Shift-Ctrl-F7 (etc) depending on what you wanted to do.
Edit -- for editing: cut, copy, paste, search, replace, etc.. (Mostly not even a menu before, just hotkeys.)
View -- for controlling viewing options: text mode, graphics mode, colour, show formatting codes, whatever.
And a bunch of others, but all had to be 1 word only, with a unique letter to open the menu with the Alt key.
The last had to be Help.
And so on. It mandated a standard, borrowing heavily from the Mac HCI guide to do it. And amazingly, it mostly caught on. MS followed it for Windows, mostly, and after Windows 3.0 DOS app vendors found it beneficial to make their clunky old DOS apps at least look and work vaguely like their Windows apps.
Ironically, MS itself had to change more than most. MS Word 3, 4 and 5 were nothing even vaguely like CUA. To load a file in them, you pressed Esc to open the menu (2 lines at the bottom of the screen), T for Transfer then L for Load.
After CUA, in Word 5.5 (a free download now, if you want to try it out -- works well under DOSemu in Linux), this was replaced by Alt-F for File, then O for Open.
Old DOS Word users had a lot of relearning to do.
Long ago, I expanded this from a stub into an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access