A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal (spectrum.ieee.org)

The difference is that Costco pays their employees well enough to keep them around (notice that Costco prints the start year on each employee badge- average retail length of service is 1 year, Costco keeps people around for decades) and so they can learn to use this older software and master it. Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.

My wife worked at a small regional chain of pharmacies that had an ancient MS-DOS based EHR system. And she mastered that system to the point where people would call her when she was home with me and ask her how to do something, and she would walk them through "okay, hit tab three times then shift-F12 then enter the frabble and then alt-F3 to go to the next screen and enter the drabble." It was difficult to learn it, but if you mastered it you could do everything you needed to do from just muscle memory while you were on the phone arguing with the doctor's office that their prescription was not correct and needed to be changed.

Then the small chain got bought by a national player and their brand new GUI system was brought in. It was a lot easier to learn- discoverability was a lot higher with menus and drop-downs and all of that. But if you stuck around to master it, you could never be as fast as you could with the older system. And that emphasis on quickly integrating new employees- but lower payoff for experience in employees- was clear in every choice that national chain made. They wanted their employees to be completely interchangeable, which meant that they didn't care if you had six months of experience or four years of experience or three decades of experience.

For me, it's typically a balance between speed and efficency of data to help you make decisions quickly, but should be able to be used by anyone with technical experience.

So less of both. Less 'pretty UI' and less "omfg here is every piece of information shoved together and you need to be a wizard to understand it"

It's so pure.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the complaint. But it’s not like the designers are unaware of more information dense alternatives.

I read this and then I think of glass doors with handles on both sides that I don't open till I read the instruction on the affixed plate: PUSH/PULL. The door forces this decision on every single conscientious user. These things are everywhere, including software interfaces.

I'd love to know how they make frontends as responsive as possible. To the engineering blog!