software for the 1984 Apple Macintosh computer should look and function. When it was first written, the Mac was new, and graphical user interface (GUI) software was a novelty, so Apple took great pains to ensure that programs would conform to a single shared look and feel. CUA had a similar aim, but it faced the more difficult task of trying to impose this retroactively on an existing, thriving but chaotic industry, with the much more ambitious goal of unifying all UI, from personal computers to minicomputers to mainframes; and supporting both character and GUI modes, and both batch and interactive designs. By comparison, the Apple HIG only supported interactive GUI on a standalone personal computer. CUA also attempted to be a more measurable standard than the Apple HIG and had large sections formatted as checklists to measure compliance. Description The CUA contains standards for the operation of elements such as dialog boxes, menus and keyboard shortcuts that have become so influential that they are implemented today by many programmers who have never read the CUA. Some of these standards can be seen in the operation of Windows itself and DOS-based applications like the MS-DOS 5 full-screen text editor edit.com. CUA hallmarks include: All operations can be done with either the mouse or the keyboard; If applicable to the page/screen in question provides a refresh function; Menus are activated/deactivated with the key; Menus are opened by pressing the key plus the underlined letter of the menu name; Menu commands that require parameters to proceed are suffixed with an ellipsis ("…"); Options are requested using secondary windows (often called dialog boxes); Options are divided into sections using notebook tabs; Navigation within fields in dialog boxes is by cursor key; navigation between fields is by pressing the key; + moves backwards; Dialog boxes have a 'Cancel' button, activated by pressing the key, which discards changes, and an 'OK' button, activated by pressing , which accepts changes; Applications have online help accessed by a Help menu, which is the last option on the menu bar; context sensitive help can be summoned by ; The first menu is to be called 'File' and contains operations for handling files (new, open, save, save as) as well as quitting the program; the next menu 'Edit' has commands for undo, redo, cut, copy, delete, paste commands; The Cut command is +; Copy is +; Paste is +;