To my horror, I recently had to visit the UEFI firmware setup of a Lenovo tablet.... That was touch enabled.

And it is to be expected to be able to configure a touchscreen device using the touchscreen.

Most gaming laptops' UEFI screens are so "gamer" it's cringe. Dell XPS series have UEFI GUIs that are quite neat and absolutely an improvement over the text screens.

I'm also partial to the Surface devices'. MS put a surprising amount of effort into making them look Windows-y.

I did enjoy my Dell touchscreen-supported firmware setup when there was a menu 15 items long and an incredibly slow mouse speed.

> Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time

Long-time Thinkpad users scoff at that ... while the figure of a duck suddenly enters their minds..

(Yes: I clearly remember my pre-USB thinkpad having a graphical BIOS with windows, icons, and a duck-shaped mouse cursor).

For those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTaNi6uL41s

BIOSes of the time were all written in highly-optimised Asm, and I suspect those little "easter eggs" they added were because the programmers knew they had enough space left over to put some more fun stuff in.

There was also AMI WinBIOS that provided a GUI, but I remember it being much less featureful than other BIOSes of the time with a TUI and didn't like mobos that used it, so in that case they may have sacrificed functionality for appearance.

I miss Openboot firmware that was on SunOS servers and workstations. It was IIRC mostly written in FORTH and we could write forth snippets at the serial console to make mods / query the pre boot environment. I also found the SGI boot firmware similarly functional. Both allowed changing boot settings and allowed to boot from network without any trouble at all. Graphical BIOS that came with the x86 systems was such a downgrade for us especially since you could not interact over serial/remotely with a simple terminal connection. IMHO

Somebody missed the memo: https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/

Is there also a term for when you present mangagers or clients with an array of options and intentionally degrade the ones that in your opinion would come out worse? Asking as a graphic who would never ask someone to pick the best of three pitches while alreading harboring a strong preference.

A 90's TUI that will forever be more productive than Windows 11.

As someone with experience in Turbo Vision and Clipper, I don't miss them, beyond some nostalgia from simpler times.

> Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time

I've had a GUI BIOS setup on almost every PC I've owned since the first 486 I built back in 1993.

The GUI was rendered in text mode. It's called a TUI (Text-based User Interface)

Plenty of 486 era machines had the AMI ”WinBIOS” whose setup utility kinda-sorta emulated a Win 3.x look and ran in (EGA 640x350 4bpp?) graphics mode, with mouse support:

https://media.moddb.com/images/groups/1/4/3107/winbios.gif

TIL, I thought TUI meant Terminal UI