Chapter 27: Menus--The Pedagogic Vector

The modern GUI with its drop-down menus and dialog boxes hasn't been around that long—only since 1984 and the Macintosh—as a mainstream design idiom. Still, it is now so ubiquitous that it is easy to take for granted. It is worthwhile to peer backwards and see the path we've taken in the development of the modern dialog and menu interface to best understand menus' strengths and potential pitfalls.

The Command-Line interface

If you wanted to talk to an IBM mainframe computer in the 1970s, you had to manually keypunch a deck of computer cards, use an obscure language called JCL (job control language) to tell the computer how to read your program, and submit this deck of cards to the system through a noisy, mechanical card reader. Each line of JCL or program had to be punched on a separate card. Even the first microcomputers, small, slow, and stupid, running a primitive operating system called CP/M, had a much better conversational style than those hulking dinosaurs in their refrigerated glass houses. You could communicate directly with microcomputers running CP/M merely by typing commands into a standard keyboard. What a miracle! The program issued a prompt on the computer screen that looked like this:

      A> 

You could then type in the names of programs, which were stored as files, as commands and CP/M would run them. We called it the command-line interface, and it was widely considered a great leap forward in man-machine communications.

The only catch is that you had to know what to type. For frequent users, who at that time were mostly programmers, the command-line prompt was very powerful and effective because it offered the quickest and most efficient route to getting the desired task done. With his hands on the keyboard in the best tradition of touch typists, the user could rip out "copy a: *.* b:" and the disk was copied. And today, if you possess the knowledge, the command line is still faster than using a mouse for many operations.

The command-line interface really separated the men (and women) from the nerds. As software got more powerful and complex, however, the memorization demands that the command-line interface made on users were just too great, and it had to give way to something better.