sch (12/07/82)
I have had the personal displeasure of using several slow menu driven systems on a slow (300 baud) terminal. After using unix which is comfortable, though not great, on a slow terminal I hate using such systems. Because: a) They always waste time printing out more than I need to know. And I am paying real money for this connect time. b) They make you go back and forth through many screens of menus, printing out all the choices each time. Or worse, you have to go thru six screens just to logout. c) They are just plain awkward to use. I don't mind using menu systems on a fast ( >= 9600 baud) video terminal, but on home computers/terminals they are definate losers. If the people marketing these services want to have my money, they had better clean up their act.
dennis (12/09/82)
The best thing I've ever seen done for menus was done on the PLATO system (probably copyright CDC, or some such): a screen clear command throws away all pending output. This means that you can page through menus as fast as you can type. These menus were the kind that accepted a single character as the selector; obviously this whole scheme is inappropriate for those menu systems that require the user to position the cursor on the menu item being selected and hitting ENTER. PLATO's terminal all being exactly the same from the programs' point of view allows this to happen deep in the bowels of the I/O system; the programmer never sees it. Such a facility wouldn't be difficult to add to a UNIX system; it could be embedded in curses without too much trouble. You might have to add an ioctl to flush a buffer, but that's real easy. Menu systems aren't impossible to make friendly!