Thread: Control-C, etc
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Old 10th Jun 2021, 9:49 pm   #13
Slothie
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Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK.
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Default Re: Control-C, etc

In the "Wild west" days of software, there were no real standards. In ~1987 IBM releases the "Common User Access" or CUA standard which I remember being given when I worked at a software house in the late 80s, and detailed standard menu layouts, keyboard shortcuts etc for its SAA (System Application Architecture) and this applied to all IBM Operating systems including OS/2 and Windows applications. It was widely adopted by other manufacturers. The keyboard shortcuts were derived based on what other popular systems did (including the work of Larry Tesla as pointed out by Malcolm above). Things like F1 for help and F2 for save were common tropes for software from a number of vendors. It is speculated that IBM drew from the Apple User Interface guidelines that were released a few years earlier and I beleive were based on the research of Xerox and their smalltalk operating system. So its kind of a twisted path, but the major influences over the years ultimately have been Microsoft and Apple who standrdised things across all their OS's and applications and so software developers followed suit.
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