Comment by wilsonnb3

It's also about consumer software versus business software.

Consumer software is all about conning people who don't currently own the software into thinking it's good and buying it. Once they have it, their experience doesn't matter at all. In fact, you should actively make the software less capable - really dumb it down, to appeal to the widest audience. Yes, more white space, yes, more menus. An error message that says 'oopsy something went wrong'? What a splendid idea! Information density does not matter. Speed does not matter. Accuracy of data does not matter. Hell, even bugs don't matter, if your software looks pretty.

Business software is different. It's crufty, it's ugly, and it doesn't change. Because you're optimizing for your users using the same software for 8 hours a day for the rest of their lives.

It's also from an era where you used one piece of software doing routine tasks that rarely changed.

Imagine learning all the keyboard shortcuts for every website you use nowadays.

For example I worked at a video store long ago that had some dos program to manage everything, I didn't own a computer and I didn't use any other software. It was still often a slow turd, and it wasn't networked with the 2 other local stores, so if I wanted to know if a customer had an account there, or if they had some stock there, I had to call.

It also is about designing things around a single buffered input stream. There is no reason GUIs couldn't do this, but most don't.

That's true, but if the use case is to display text and to optimize keyboard navigation, then the added complexity of a GUI might be unnecessary.

Variable width fonts and style sheets are nice, though.