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logickkk1yesterday at 6:36 PM1 replyview on HN

Funnily enough, IBM had already published this. CUA explicitly says tab and backtab move between fields.

so they spent seven layers of management escalating against their own standard: https://archive.org/details/ibmsj2703E/page/n13/mode/2up


Replies

mrandishyesterday at 7:36 PM

Not being familiar with the term CUA, I looked it up and TIL something (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access). Since the doc you linked is dated 1988 and CUA was a brand new thing circa OS/2 (at least in traditional IBM timescales), the apparent inconsistency might be down to the massive scale of IBM in those days and organizational propagation delay.

Another factor could be still-reverberating echoes of the likely political battles around something as broad and far-reaching as CUA. I can only imagine the quiet boardroom battles won and lost fighting over CUA between different factions across all of IBM's kingdoms, divisions and principalities.