There are companies that have lived so long that their story is no longer told only through big launches, acquisitions or business battles. It is also told in small details, in those seemingly minor scenes that, seen over time, end up explaining an era better than many official statements. Microsoft and IBM fall into that category. Their paths crossed when the personal computer It was still defining many of its rules, and some of those discussions, even the most minute ones, revealed something deeper than a technical difference.
The scene has been recovered by Raymond Chen, a veteran Microsoft engineer who has been linked to the evolution of Windows for more than three decades and who for years has been bringing together in The Old New Thing some of the most curious stories of the Windows and Microsoft ecosystem. Chen does not present the episode as his own experience, but as the memory of a colleague who was assigned to IBM’s offices in Boca Raton, Florida, during the collaboration between both companies on OS/2.
OS/2 was much more than just another name lost in software history. IBM and Microsoft presented it in 1987 as an operating system designed for the IBM PS/2 line and intended to take the PC beyond the limitations of DOS, with a more modern base and ambitions typical of computing that was beginning to look further afield. The collaboration came from a joint development agreement signed in 1985when the project was not yet called OS/2. In that context, any interface decision could have more weight than it seems today, because many conventions of the modern PC were still being established.
Two very similar and also very different companies
The problem is that that collaboration brought together two companies at very different times in their lives. Microsoft was still a young company, very attached to software and a more direct way of working, while IBM arrived with decades of history, a huge structure and the weight of a much more established corporate culture. Chen summarizes it as a clash of perceptions: Microsoft saw IBM as trapped in a meaningless bureaucracy, and IBM saw Microsoft as undisciplined hackers. Its own nuance is important: there was probably something right in both readings.
The specific anecdote begins in Boca Raton, where a colleague of Chen’s worked assigned to the IBM offices. At some point a discussion arose about which key should be used to move from one field to another within the dialog boxes. The Microsoft engineer made a decision that is almost invisible to us today because of how assumed it is: use Tab for that function. IBM was not convinced by the choice and asked that the matter will be escalated to the person responsible from that engineer in Redmond, a reaction that already hinted at the extent to which the discrepancy went beyond the key itself.
In Redmond, the petition was not understood as an issue that deserved to be raised much higher. The engineer’s manager responded with a very clear idea: if Microsoft had sent someone to Boca Raton, it was so that they could resolve decisions like that there. Translated into a more institutional tone, the message that came back to IBM was that Microsoft supported the choice of the Tab key. IBM’s reaction was just the opposite. Instead of shutting down the discussion, the company elevated her up its own chain of command to a vice president, several levels above those who were programming.
IBM had not only elevated the discussion, it also wanted a response to the same hierarchical height. If its vice president was against using Tab, Microsoft had to find someone equivalent to argue the opposite. Chen’s colleague then responded with a wonderful phrase, translated here into Spanish: “Bill Gates’ mother is not interested in the Tab key“It was a pretty nice way of saying that it wasn’t worth going up the corporate elevator anymore. It wasn’t necessary to go to the heights of Microsoft to decide how to move from one field to another in a dialog box.
The phrase worked, at least according to Chen’s account: apparently, after that response, the discussion ended and Tab remained the key chosen to advance between fields. The detail is funny because today almost no one stops to think about it: we simply press Tab and wait for the cursor to jump to the next available space. But there was a time when that convention was not so closed. And what we see in this story is just that: a small interface decision turned into a clash between custom, hierarchy and technical criteria.
The exact date, however, does not appear in Chen’s account. We know that the episode belongs to the years of collaboration between Microsoft and IBM around OS/2, whose joint development agreement dates back to 1985 and whose Public arrival occurred in 1987. This allows us to limit the context, but not to set the day or year of the discussion by Tab.
There are many decisions behind the products and services we use every day. Some are huge and visible, but others fly under the radar: a key, a gesture, an interface convention that we learn once and repeat for years without wondering where it came from. Surely many have a story behind them, although most never transcend and others would not be particularly interesting. From time to time, however, an anecdote like this appears and allows us to peek into something we almost never see: how things are handled within the companies that build the technology we use.
Images | Kaatvrtg (Wikimedia Commons) |
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