> “a brilliant stroke of genius the likes of which the world is not likely to see again. If that one guy hadn't been born, we would have gone thousands of years with no method”

But that’s not the criteria for granting a patent. It doesn’t have to be a stroke of genius. It can be something that many people could invent at the particular moment of the filing (as evidenced by many cases of near-simultaneous patent filings, like Daimler and Benz competing for the ICE in the 1880s). It just needs to be demonstrably novel.

I’m not saying tabbing back and forth through dialog fields qualifies, but then again it’s hard to place oneself in 1980.

The arrow keys, and enter, are the obvious ones to use, but you have to move off of home row to hit them. That's the "non-obvious" bit of using the tab key to navigate fields. Back when that level of usability was important.