Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I realized that people love Slack because it…

I really like your tone throughout and the length is perfect. It is difficult to put down something everyone uses without coming off as arrogant and rude. Even the calls to action at the end seem gentle enough to not spark flame wars. It's a fine line, someone may disagree with me on that. I can see this becoming one of those canonical pages that is still being referenced 10 years later. Being short enough to share and simple enough…

> Rich media elements: images, videos, tabulated results, etc. The terminal has needed an answer to these since 1985 No digital audio or video in 1985 (that'd be a challenge even high-power workstations were far from capable of doing) but lots of physical terminals supported graphics, in the form of Tektronix 401x (more common, implemented in xterm), ReGIS (available on DEC models with graphics), and Sixel graphics (based on printer graphics control codes, available on almost all terminals that supported…