Re:IBM Common User Access
by ghaff on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:10AM
(#27221286)
Except for maybe some old Unix software like Vim, I'm guessing a lot of people here were never exposed to a world like DOS where, to a greater of lesser degree, every program had a complete unique command structure. There was even a major lawsuit (which was never really resolved) between Lotus and Borland over the latter mimicking Lotus 1-2-3 menus.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
> I'm guessing a lot of people here were never exposed to a world like DOS
Which is why, 16 years ago, I took over that article and fleshed out a stub into something more descriptive, with examples and so on. :-) I'm rather pleased to see it on the front page of HN.
CUA is a lot more pervasive now than people appreciate, I suspect. It's what unifies the designs of KDE, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE/LXQt, Enlightenment, and so on. Mac OS X is closer to it than classic MacOS was. There are visible traces of it in Haiku.
In fact it's almost easier to point to UIs that don't have much trace of it -- aside from touchscreen ones. There are Oberon and A2,. There's Plan 9 -- but its successor Inferno is more CUA-influenced.
Re:IBM Common User Access
by smhenderson on Thursday May 20, 2021 @11:35AM
(#27222514)
It was so prolific that a lot of software at the time came with a cardboard cutout with the keyboard shortcuts printed on it. Most were long and not very wide so they would fit on your keyboard above the function keys. Fancier ones even had cutouts so it rested over the keys and effectively relabeled them.