2 reactions
A dispute over the TAB key highlights a mismatch between Microsoft and IBM organizational structures
Raymond Chen
I’ve written in the past about the cultural mismatch between Microsoft and IBM during the collaboration on OS/2, with the Microsofties viewing their IBM colleagues as mired in pointless bureaucracy and the IBM folks viewing Microsofties as undisciplined hackers.¹
One of many points of mismatch was the organizational structure.
A colleague recalls that while he was assigned to the IBM offices in Boca Raton, Florida, there was a dispute over what key should be used to move from one field to another in dialog boxes. The folks at IBM were not happy with my colleague’s decision to use the TAB key, so they asked him to escalate the issue to his manager back in Redmond.
My colleague’s manager replied, “The reason you are in Boca is to make these decisions so I don’t have to be in Boca.”
My colleague rephrased this reply in a more corporate manner before passing it on to IBM: “Microsoft supports the use of the TAB key for this purpose.”
Unsatisfied, the IBM folks escalated the issue up their organizational chain for several levels, and replied that their VP (who was around seven levels of management above the programmers) was absolutely opposed to the use of the TAB for this purpose, and they wanted confirmation from the equivalent-level manager at Microsoft that Microsoft stands by the choice of the TAB key.
My colleague replied, “Bill Gates’s mother is not interested in the TAB key.”
This apparently ended the discussion, and the TAB key stayed.
Note: This upcoming Sunday is Mother’s Day in the United States. You probably shouldn’t ask her for her opinion on the TAB key.
¹ There was probably merit to both arguments.
2-
Share on Facebook
- Share on X
-
Share on Linkedin
Category
- Old New Thing
Topics
- History
Share
Author
Raymond ChenRaymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.
6 comments
Join the discussion.
Leave a commentCancel reply
Sign in
Code of Conduct Sort by : Newest Newest Popular Oldest-
Minherz Minherz
5 hours ago
0
Wonderful story. It is hard to imagine something like this happening today.
Log in to Vote or Reply -
Vadim Zeitlin
5 hours ago
2
Was the key IBM wanted to use for dialog navigation lost in the depths of history? I’d like to know what it was, if only to appreciate what we escaped from.
Log in to Vote or Reply-
LB 2 hours ago 0
If you work with keyboard input at all, you’ll see there’s a ton of historical keys that don’t exist on most modern keyboards, some of which might make for good candidates for switching between input fields in forms. Nowdays, they’re just useful for programs that remap hotkeys from icon button peripherals.
Log in to Vote or Reply -
Brian Boorman
3 hours ago
0
You assume they had one. Some primes push back on every decision a subcontractor makes just because that’s how they operate, while providing no solution/alternative of their own.
Those are fun projects to work on (/s)
Log in to Vote or Reply -
Knox North
4 hours ago
0
I wonder if it was a key associated with the terminals used for Mainframes. On the original 3270 keyboards, field navigation wasn’t done with a “Tab” key the way you’d think of it on a PC. The dedicated keys were called Field Forward (→|) and Field Backward (|←) — sometimes labeled as “Skip” — usually shown with arrow-and-bar symbols. The data-entry keyboard layout (modeled after IBM’s keypunch) had its own conventions inherited from card-punch operators, and there was no PC-style “Tab” key in the typewriter sense.
Log in to Vote or Reply
-
-
Martin Ibert
6 hours ago
0
This is absolutely hilarious. Thanks for sharing!
Log in to Vote or Reply
Sure, xor’ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out, but why not sub?
Raymond Chen
Forgotten message from the past: LB_INITSTORAGE
Raymond Chen
