Tin was initially used on text-only display terminals connected via a slow serial interface to a multi-user time sharing central server, where graphics were generally not supported and when the computer mouse did not yet exist. At the time, tin was considered to be somewhat of a high-resource program in this environment (similar to the Pine email client) due to its use of terminal cursor control and page-oriented text scrolling to make navigating Usenet easier. While it did not have graphics support it does provide a visually organized browser-oriented drill-down list of groups, subjects, and then articles, as opposed to simply scrolling endless pages and menus upwards from the bottom of the screen.
