Comment by cameldrv
6 months ago
Yes. Back in the DOS days, and even before, when people used actual terminals, there was a keystroke buffer. You'd see people who really knew the interface fly through tasks being multiple keystrokes ahead of the UI. Stuff would just flash onto the screen and disappear as it processed the input that was already in its buffer. It should be possible to implement this with modern frameworks, but it requires thought.
Yeah. I used to work as a phone surveyor, the one you hate. Our software is a terminal connected to a mainframe. I got used to it after a few weeks and was very productive.
Costco Canada vision shops still use a terminal connected to an AS/400 machine as I snooped around last month.
In the late 90s I was required to slowly replace dumb terminals with PCs. One of the older ladies taking phone orders was most put out by this, understandably. She was lightning fast on that terminal. She'd never used a PC (I hit on the idea of using solitaire to learn to use a mouse, which worked amazingly well), and was never able to get to the same speed with one as she'd done on her dumb terminal. It's hard to beat the performance of dedicated devices.
While I agree that dedicated devices can be more efficient than Windows-style user interfaces, and even more so than browser-based user interfaces, many people don't use those modern interfaces in efficient ways.
I have observed countless times how many people fill in a field, than move their hand to the mouse to move the focus to the next field or button, than move their hand back to the keyboard, instead of just pressing tab to move the focus. It's painful to watch. Knowing just a few keyboard shortcuts makes filling in forms so much faster.
Things are getting worse, unfortunately. Modern user interfaces, especially in web interfaces, are made by people who have no idea about those efficient ways of using them, and are starting to make it more and more difficult to use any other method than keyboard -> mouse -> keyboard -> mouse -> ... . Tab and shift-tab often don't work, or don't work right. You can't expand comboboxes with F4, only the mouse. You can't type dates, but have to painstakingly select all the parts in inefficient pickers. You can't toggle options with the spacebar. You can't commit with enter or cancel with esc.
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I recall reading somewhere that the entire point of solitaire (at least the original implementation that came with windows 3) was to teach users how to click and drag, so I'm not surprised that it was good for teaching your colleague how to use a mouse
An inventory management app was one of my first paid software engineering projects. Sometime in early 00s I had to rewrite it for Windows because the ancient DOS codebase had a bunch of issues running on then-modern Windows versions. I sat down with the users and watched how they were using the DOS version, including the common patterns of keyboard navigation, and then meticulously recreated them in the WinForms version.
For example, much of the time would be spend in a search dialog where you had a textbox on top and a grid with items right below. In the TUI version, all navigation was with arrow keys, and pressing down arrow in the textbox would move the focus to the first item on the grid. Similarly, if you used up arrow to scroll through the items in the grid all the way to the top, another press would move the cursor to the textbox. This was not the standard focus behavior for Windows apps, but it was very simple to wire up, and the users were quite happy with the new WinForms version in the end.
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In my own little world, I saw this first with mail and news readers. It was fast and simple to read mail and news with pine and tin: The same keystroke patterns, over and over, to peruse and reply to emails and usenet threads.
As the network ebbed and flowed, email too-often became unreadable without a GUI, and what was once a good time of learning things on usenet became browsing web forums instead. It sucked. (It still sucks.)
In the greater world, I saw it happen first at auto parts stores.
One day, the person behind the counter would key in make/model/year/engine and requested part in a blur of familiar keystrokes on a dumb terminal. It was very, very fast for someone who was skilled -- and still pretty quick for those who hadn't yet gotten the rhythm of it.
But then, seemingly the next day: The terminals were replaced by PCs with a web browser and a mouse. Rather than a predictable (repeatable!) series of keystrokes to enter to get things done, it was all tedious pointing, clicking, and scrolling.
It was slow. (And it's still slow today.)
I saw this at an airport. Took the same plane twice, one year apart, in between they had replaced the terminal by a web UI. First trip it took 15 seconds from the hostess (well into her 50s) to find my booking and print my pass. Second trip (on the web UI), it took 4 hostesses to team up for something that felt like 5 good minutes to do the same thing.
Costco still uses AS/400 company-wide for their inventory system I think
Interesting. Looks like it suits them perfectly. I wonder if the AS/400 is running in an emulator or on a real machine.
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Fun story: When I worked at blockbuster I had my computer access revoked and summoned to explain because a colleague told management I was “hacking” when they saw me doing this on the computer system.
Makes me wonder if that’s where the TV trope of a hacker flying through screens faster than you can see came from
Was that still on the VMS-based blockbuster video system?
Weird question, but I accidentally ended up with one of those in my hands that ran in probably non-blockbuster place from 1996 to 2000 :)
> You'd see people who really knew the interface fly through tasks being multiple keystrokes ahead of the UI.
I remember.
This, unfortunately, killed people: Therac-25. Granted, the underlying cause was a race condition, but the trigger was the flying fingers of experts typing ahead, unknowingly having been trained to rely on the hardware interlock present in older models.
> This, unfortunately, killed people: Therac-25. Granted, the underlying cause was a race condition
So it didn't kill people, something else was that cause
I'm not trying to shift blame to the operators here, but in the absence of flying fingers, nobody would have died. Many, many, people received the right treatment in the Therac-25 machine.
Also, the author of the buggy software had no idea it would be used to operate a machine without a hardware interlock as, AFAIR, it was not modified prior to being used with the Therac-25 model.
Remember the venomous, desperate BEEP! when the keystroke buffer was full. (Or was it when pressing too many keys at once?) Like a tortured waveform generator constantly interrupted by some higher-priority IRQ. Good times.
The keyboard buffer size was something like sixteen keystrokes. This was bad news if you noticed your input wasn't working and you needed to press CTRL + whatever to quit the program since the buffer was full and unable to accept the CTRL + whatever. Instead it had to be CTRL + ALT + DEL.
Three decades later I learn that there were utilities to make the keyboard buffer bigger. But, in those days before search engines, how was I to know?