alt Hacker NewsThey had modal menus back then, they just didn't display them. You had to memorize which obscure symbols to press, to change various settings. For example, in the 1970's, HP's calculator watch required pressing ⯅• to switch between 12 hr and 24 hr modes, or A⯅A to clear an alarm.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
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You can bury stuff like setting the time into a menu, people will accept it. They know that there will be a way to set the time. But if the 12/24 is hidden, whatever is picked as the default will drive away a noticeable fraction of those would-be buyers who prefer the other setting. For starters, pretty much everybody who does not get pulled into a sales person interaction that's sufficiently deep to touch the subject. And that sales person interaction won't be the best possibly, you don't want to bore them with nuisance settings, you want to show off The Stopwatch (or whatever was the flagship feature of the watch in question)
> required pressing ⯅•
I don't know what clever jiggery-pokery you are trying to do, but whatever you typed, it's just turning to tofu on this Macbook, in both Chrome and Firefox.