[HN Gopher] Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-b...
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Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI).
Anybody else?
Is anybody still using TUI applications for business? My family
company is a wholesale distribution firm (with lightweight
manufacturing) and has been using the same TUI application (on prem
unix box) since 1993. We use it for customer management, ordering,
invoicing, kit management/build tickets, financials - everything.
We've transitioned from green screen terminals to modern emulators,
but the core system remains. I spent many summers running serial
and ethernet cables. I left the business years ago to become a
full time software engineer, but I got my start as a script kiddie
writing automations for this system with Microsoft Access, VBA, and
SendKeys to automate data entry. Amazingly, they still have a
Windows XP machine running many of those tasks I wrote back in
2004! It's brittle, but cumulatively has probably saved years of
time. That XP machine could survive a nuclear winter lol. I
recently stepped back in to help my parents and spent a day
converting many of those old scripts to a more modern system (with
actual error-handling instead of strategic sleep()s and prayers)
using Python and telnetlib3. I had a blast and still love this
application. I can fly around in it. Training new people was always
a pain, but for those that got it--they had super powers. This got
me thinking: Are other companies still using this type of interface
to drive their core operations? I'm reflecting on whether the only
reason my family's business still uses this system is because of
the efficiency hacks I put in place 20+ years ago. Without them,
would they have been forced to switch to a modern cloud/GUI system?
I'm not sure if I'm blinded by nostalgia or if this application is
truly as wonderful as I remember it. I'd love to hear if and how
these are still being utilized in the real world. P.S. The system
we use was originally sold by ADP and has had different names (D2K,
Prophet21). I believe Epicor owns it now (Activant before). P.P.S.
Is anybody migrating their old TUI automation scripts to a more
modern framework or creating new ones? I'm super curious to compare
notes and see what other people are doing.
Author : urnicus
Score : 234 points
Date : 2025-11-05 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
| palmotea wrote:
| > This got me thinking: Are other companies still using this type
| of interface to drive their core operations?
|
| Probably a big chunk of businesses that developed their core
| systems before the PC era. I don't know if they still use it, but
| Avis Rent-a-car's main application used by its front-line people
| was a TUI like that, and the front desk people could fly around
| int it (like you said).
|
| But most developers ape current trends rather than actually
| figuring out what would work best, so I'd guess very few user-
| facing TUIs are being built now.
| mitchell_h wrote:
| Lowes and home depot come to mind. Their POS/terminals are just a
| terminal into an TUI. John Deere, kabota and other ag equipment
| service & parts providers still largely use a TUI.
| vablings wrote:
| Also, Costco uses AS/400. Applications that are pure function
| over form are amazing
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I'm not positive whether Target's system from ~15 years ago
| was a TUI, but a friend worked there in college. He mentioned
| the process for tax exempt purchases was a bit
| challenging/not the most common. There were some frequent
| shoppers who had heard the assistance from the manager enough
| times, they could walk an employee through what buttons to
| press to get it setup correctly.
| sentientslug wrote:
| Was not a TUI, but was totally controllable from the
| keyboard. There was no mouse or touch screen, you could get
| pretty fast at it. You are also correct about the tax
| exempt thing, the customers who used it often knew what to
| ask for. The new registers now have a completely different
| UI with a touch screen. Seems like a step backwards.
| Apreche wrote:
| Reminds me of this story from 2021
|
| https://hackaday.com/2021/10/06/atari-st-still-manages-campg...
|
| I have also met some people who worked at large old insurance
| companies. They originally used old mainframes and TUI, and the
| companies still exist. They told me of various things that were
| done. Of course migrations happened. And interfaces were built so
| that modern systems could speak with the old, sometimes via
| terminal emulator. And of course, some old systems still in use
| far beyond their time.
| pkphilip wrote:
| Interesting. What sort of database are they running and what is
| the frontend? Dbase? Foxpro? Turbo Pascal with BDE?
| theragra wrote:
| Foxpro is alive and well in our town water utilities company.
| My fellow student still works on it. I don't know a worse way
| to waste your best years.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| What do you consider waste? Living in a small town? Working
| for a utility company? Working with outdated software?
| H1Supreme wrote:
| Working with FoxPro, I'm assuming. I spent several years
| dealing with xBase systems, and it was honestly a
| nightmare. I suppose if you've never used any other
| language or database, you wouldn't notice. Plus, the bit
| relative to the OP, it's a mostly worthless skill.
| philipov wrote:
| Does linux count? 99% of linux use-cases don't include xwindows.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| They are managed via terminal probably, but only few cases the
| business application runs as TUI.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Both of the lumberyards in my city are still running on DOS (or
| DOS emulation) for their systems, along with quotes printed on
| dot matrix printers (and no online price sheet). They're so low
| margin and old school, I don't think they get tech upgrades more
| often than once every two human generations except for new
| capital equipment, which sucks most of their surplus.
| jorts wrote:
| I supported a lumberyard that was like this too. Also, some
| "modern" laser machines required ancient versions of Windows
| and required floppy discs. This was about 20 years ago, though.
| urnicus wrote:
| I still use a dot matrix in my office lol. I love the sound and
| they are so cheap to operate.
| huherto wrote:
| TUI were great for many business applications, specially those in
| warehouses or factories. They were easier to write and modify.
| Many business applications were migrated to web for little gain.
| IMHO.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Sam Ash (recently defunct U.S. musical instrument chain)
| infamously used a system called GERS with a TUI, the components
| of which IIRC were adapted from either a furniture or carpet
| store. Well into the 2000s, receipts were still printed in full
| size carbon paper (triplicate) on dot matrix printers. You'd get
| a gift "card" that was a literal greeting card with one sheet of
| that dot matrix printout stuffed in it.
| trbleclef wrote:
| I noticed Guitar Center also using a TUI when I was in there
| last.
| arthurfirst wrote:
| I worked on a PCI-DSS project at a major consumer electronics
| retailer almost 17 years ago as an AIX/Solaris specialist.
|
| At that time their 'web store' just put paid orders in a queue
| and a room full of humans typed the orders into the green screen
| which had all the actual inventory.
| arichard123 wrote:
| I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching
| to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard
| interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the
| screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a
| fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right
| incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of
| the screen every time. You didn't have to hunt for the right
| place to look. You pressed the keys, which were buffered, looked
| to the appropriate part of the screen and more often than not the
| information you required appeared as you looked.
|
| Moving to a web based system meant we all had to use mice and
| spend our days moving them to the correct button on the page all
| the time. It added hours and hours to the processing.
|
| Bring back the TUI!
| bdavisx wrote:
| A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100%
| usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications
| take the time to do that design.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't
| is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without
| looking at the screen.
|
| Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you
| can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of
| operators.
|
| There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard
| driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-
| both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
| conductr wrote:
| Maybe in some cases. But largely, no, it really is not
| comparable. These TUI interfaces literally had 0 latency for
| any action. You could paste in text (from clipboard), with \t
| characters, and it would advance the input focus and could
| fill out an entire form with once paste action. There's a ton
| of real world cases where the browser is just too heavy to
| keep up with fast paced data entry.
|
| I've never once seen an experienced user equal or gain
| efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after
| months of acclimation.
| andix wrote:
| It's totally possible to get this done with a web based
| SPA. Just get rid of all the fancy design, images,
| gradients, animations, and so on, and just focus on
| usability.
|
| The management needs to pick the right concept though, not
| the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one
| that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user
| flows need to take less than x seconds for an average
| user).
| noir_lord wrote:
| Possible yes but there are properties of a TUI vs a GUI
| where the TUI encourages faster keyboard navigation
| because when they were common there was _only_ keyboard
| navigation whereas a GUI comes with it 's own upsides
| (discoverability been the big one).
|
| When I was in college (many years ago) the company I
| worked for used a TUI for its inventory/back office
| systems (terminal emulator talking to an AS/400) and once
| you understood the hierarchical structure and how it
| worked you could _fly_ through that system because it was
| _all_ keyboard nav.
|
| Few GUI's have ever been that fast for me even the ones
| that go out of their way to make everything accessible
| via the _GUI_ bindable.
| andix wrote:
| The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too
| focused on pretty looks, instead of productivity. It's
| still possible to make a highly productive UI look
| pretty, but the priority is often completely wrong.
|
| They shouldn't start from a few pretty figma sketches and
| then try to make them more usable. They should start from
| user flows, solve how the users can do certain things
| with maximum productivity, easy navigation, showing the
| right data together on the same screen, and so on. Only
| in the end make it pretty.
| hulitu wrote:
| > The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too
| focused on pretty looks,
|
| It may be pretty but it makes me puke.
|
| The "modern UX design" is based on layers upon layers of
| abstraction and "cheap" interfaces. Which one is the
| button ? Where is the scrollbar ?
| conductr wrote:
| I was just giving some examples, it being theoretically
| possible in SPA isn't really helpful given that nobody
| will implement it that way. You're basically living in
| theory.
|
| I've literally done the before and after on this a
| handful of times and it's always worse off. Management
| will never do that, it's always design by committee, the
| KPIs won't be defined or will never really have teeth, it
| will turn into someone's vanity project, they won't even
| pay someone to optimize the code - quite the opposite,
| they'll choose to build it on something like Salesforce
| or some other very non-performant enterprise-y platform,
| etc, etc. All the TUI get these performance gains out of
| the box without much additional effort. The constraints
| of the UI are it's strength as it prevents people from
| adding all this bloat in the first place. When you leave
| it up to people, especially business users or UX folks,
| it will get spoiled. It's almost a law.
| andix wrote:
| > nobody will implement it that way
|
| This is not true. Smart companies do it exactly that way.
| It saves them a lot of money.
| saulpw wrote:
| I've never seen a smart company then.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I have a hard time believing this. The medium impacts
| interaction.
|
| Do you have concrete examples in mind that we can review?
| andix wrote:
| The things I've worked on were custom tools for internal
| use. Built on top of existing systems, to improve
| productivity for specific workflows.
| hulitu wrote:
| > It's totally possible to get this done with a web based
| SPA.
|
| Sending http response, waiting for reply. Http 200 ok
|
| and so on and so forth. Web sucks. Of course, you can
| have something like Jira, bur still sucks.
| hgamaral wrote:
| > It's totally possible to get this done with a web based
| SPA.
|
| Yeah, I guess I could say that before I tried rebinding
| ctrl-w and some of the Fx keys (like F12).
| andix wrote:
| Sure, in a browser you can't use all the shortcuts, but
| still a lot. If you really need it, just wrap it in
| Electron, Tauri, or any other customizable browser.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| You can sure do that, but you are basically implementing
| a terminal in a website.
| andix wrote:
| Lol, no. You can still use different font sizes,
| traditional controls that can also be used with a mouse
| (for people who don't know the shortcuts yet). Also
| images are possible where they make sense.
|
| While using very common web development stacks a lot of
| developers know how to deal with.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I give you different font sizes, but a mouse and images
| are available in the Terminal as well.
|
| I think the fancy new terminals also allow you to change
| the font.
| maccard wrote:
| My experience has always been that TUIs and Terminal
| emulators these days have massive snags with how they
| handle control codes and inputs. Pasting into a terminal is
| a crapshoot of "what on earth is it going to spew back at
| me".
|
| It's perfectly possible to handle large amounts of data by
| copy and paste on a web browser, you just have to actually
| support it.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| That is not unique to TUIs, but also possible in GUIs where
| the developers care, and in some games (try the GUI
| ("tiles") version of Brogue). You can definitely make a GUI
| that updates in an instant and be fully keyboard-driven,
| even if that may have been more common last century.
| dartharva wrote:
| A large fraction of the entire point of a GUI is not being
| keyboard-centric.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| How do I implement type-ahead in Qt or GTK application?
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Not specifically for those but I have to assume the pattern
| would work: you could intercept the keystrokes in a parent
| window or an overlay, then forward them to the correct
| child window once it's rendered.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| So you implement a rendering system and an input queue on
| top of a drawing region. Sounds like you are implementing
| a Terminal emulator.
| conductr wrote:
| I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade"
| would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I
| did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it
| landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization.
| Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.
| andix wrote:
| Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't
| understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects
| that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's
| not that hard, if you define the requirements right.
|
| Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining
| a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything
| exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively
| full screen, so no need for responsive design.
|
| The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays
| and instant responses to user input.
| HPsquared wrote:
| TUIs have a high speed ceiling when muscle memory comes into
| play.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs:
| international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen
| text in Arabic and Japanese.
| dardeaup wrote:
| Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases.
|
| FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date
| format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O?
| It's still just ASCII characters.
| dardeaup wrote:
| Yes! I was just pointing it out to show that they had at
| least thought of Japanese users (in some small way).
| Rizz wrote:
| But the past didn't use ASCII as such, but extended
| character sets, or multiple characters sets, which did
| allow for Russian, German, etc. text interfaces.
| wpm wrote:
| Actual terminal-based TUIs sure, they have small character
| sets burned into ROM, sized for 50-years-ago prices.
|
| Modern terminals, even the text-based console on a fresh
| minimal Arch linux install, is going to support Unicode
| probably without a ton of issues as long as you have a font
| installed that has the characters. The struggle then for RTL
| or non-Latin character sets and languages is making the UI
| fit the words in a way that makes sense.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Yes, you can spend an inordinate amount of time figuring
| out how to lay out multilingual text on a terminal, or just
| use Cairo or some toolkit and let solved problems stay
| solved.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Just use gettext? The strings might vary in sizes, but when
| you are comfortable with the text resolution of the GUI, just
| set your Terminal to the same resolution and that problem is
| the same.
| anthk wrote:
| Not an issue with modern terminals and Unifont.
| thwarted wrote:
| Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is
| equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the
| desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger
| movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are,
| unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a
| musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is
| thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning and
| effort to achieve that level of mastery. Meanwhile, the
| interface to traditional musical instruments, while there's
| been some changes and improvements, have stood the test of time
| and remain attractive to a lot people who want to make music.
| Many of the claimed "improvements" that GUI interfaces have
| over TUIs look in some cases, to me, like busy box toys created
| for toddlers (this is how I feel about the Windows Ribbon menu
| widgets). Once something becomes second nature, it's not "I'm
| putting my fingers in this position" it is "I want to play an A
| after this series of other notes".
| BryanA wrote:
| I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked
| for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the
| screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The
| next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for
| their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet
| as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box...
| Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of
| decades of time and motion studies.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Back then people probably got promoted for such things.
|
| Now they get promoted for changing things to appease MBAs and
| giving their boss something to talk about to their boss.
|
| America has fallen, and we can't get back up.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I'm in the distribution/manufacturing ERP vertical in the US for
| SMB clients... yes we see it. No - not often
|
| Most people are running on 90s-2000s era stuff rather than TUIs.
|
| For the most part, it works well, and is not very costly.
|
| Check out Sage100... flexible, cheap, on prem... runs everything
| from job / work tickets to inventory, purchasing, financials,
| payroll, etc.
|
| Aint sexy but it works!
| urnicus wrote:
| Nice - thank you!
| james_marks wrote:
| If it's survived this long, it likely because it has years of
| small fixes to make it reliable and useful, and more than
| anything--- predictable for the user.
|
| Modernizing will roll some of that back; I would only consider it
| if there's a plan to be around for the years it will take to get
| good again.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| People who are good programmers say this, they have this
| fantasy, but it's a myth. The opposite is of course true,
| because there is no maintenance, there are a bajillion
| agonizing bugs and people simply work around them, the "small
| fixes" live inside the heads of the people using the
| application.
|
| Like the fantasy is that the bank uses TUIs and the bank has
| accumulated years of knowledge and the bank doesn't make
| mistakes. The bank has extremely well paid staff. Joe Shmoe's
| TUI app looks like the bank's app, but it is unmaintained, it
| has accumulated years of problems, not fixes, nobody is fixing
| them, people who say they fix them cannot possibly be keeping
| up with the sheer amount of toil and bugs needed for production
| software. You can see this in any GitHub project, how much
| insane maintenance is required, for stuff people actually use
| and has few bugs.
| flomo wrote:
| Eh, I bet a lot of this stuff is running on some old SCO box
| held together with ducttape and prayers, because the vendor is
| long gone/dead.
| Ampned wrote:
| I used to work for a major greeting card company that had a TUI
| based ERP system from the 90's until like 5 years go. People were
| insanely efficient using it, but quite the learning curve to
| learn all shortcuts and commands.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Count your blessings.
|
| And if anyone suggests rewriting it, fire them.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Many (most?) older retail businesses still use TUIs. They're
| reliable, consistent, and _orders of magnitude_ faster than GUI
| systems.
|
| When I worked ar Sherwin Williams, I got good enough with the TUI
| that customers could rattle off their orders while I punch it
| into the computer in real time.
|
| It's absolutely crazy that a well designed TUI is _so_ much
| faster. It turns out that if you _never_ change the UI and
| _every_ menu item _always_ has the same hotkey, navigating the
| software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by
| how fast you can physically push the buttons.
|
| The program had many menu options added and removed over the
| decades, but the crucial part is that the hotkeys and menu
| indexes _never, ever_ changed. Once you learn that you can pop
| into a quick order menu with this specific sequence of five keys,
| you just automatically open the right menu the moment a customer
| walks up. No thought, just pure reflex.
|
| UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago. No graphical
| interface I've ever seen comes even close to the raw utility and
| speed of these finely tuned TUIs. There is a very, _very_ good
| reason that the oldest and wealthiest retail businesses still use
| this ancient software. It works, and it 's staggeringly
| effective, and any conceivable replacement will only be worse.
| There simply is no effective way to improve it.
|
| Edit: I will say that these systems take time and effort to
| learn. You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't
| too hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have
| to memorize a lot of product metadata. But the key is that it
| really doesn't take longer than your ordinary training period to
| become minimally effective. After that, you just pick up the
| muscle memory as you go. It's pretty analogous to learning touch
| typing without trying. Your hands just learn where the keys are
| and after enough time your brain translates words into keystrokes
| without active thought.
|
| It's a beautiful way to design maximally effective software.
| We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI
| and the shunning of text mode.
| trbleclef wrote:
| Just the fact that you can use the keyboard is brilliant. I
| teach high school and most of my computing tasks are in lowest-
| bidder web GUI messes (lousy UX, no hotkeys) and take _so much
| longer_ than a keyboard interface would. Even taking roll takes
| a minute or two longer than it used to.
| galaxy_gas wrote:
| I teach at a summer camp once that had custom web app for
| roll such that it displayed one name at a time to call out
| and to mark it as present you had to type their given name in
| a box, otherwise click next with empty input for absent
| jtbayly wrote:
| Somebody needs to be fired for that sort of UI...
|
| I've probably made that sort of UI without realizing it...
| jjk7 wrote:
| False absence, is better than false presence. Especially
| with kids.
|
| The UX is optimizing for accuracy over ease of use, and
| in this case is likely intentionally difficult to use.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| So much of my work as a software engineer is done in shitty
| web UIs: trello, github, google gsuite, jira, gmail,
| calendar.
|
| They are. So. Slow. Each and every one of them. Its awful
| urnicus wrote:
| I remember training a new hire on her first day and, about an
| hour in, she said she needed a coffee break. I never saw her
| again lol.
|
| Typically the first two weeks of training revolved around new
| hires asking why in the world we used this system before their
| spirits broke and they reluctantly plunged into the deep
| end...kind of like being released into the matrix.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Heh, I can relate. We employ a lot of Linux and Windows
| admins, for them it's usually not a big problem.
|
| We also have a small finance team (typically around 2
| employees), and finding somebody with a finance/billing
| background who is willing to work with TUI on Linux... that
| was a challenge :-)
| perlgeek wrote:
| I agree with basically everything you've said, but I'd add that
| I sometimes wish we had a way to sometimes pop up a GUI for
| very specific tasks.
|
| For example, enabling a fast multi-select of rows in a longish
| table (or even worse, a tree) is one of the tasks that TUIs
| don't really excel at. Popping up a PDF or image viewer would
| also be great.
|
| The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is
| accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users
| to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Yeah, everything that couldn't be done through the TUI was a
| shitty web app, or worse, an iPad app. Fortunately those
| tasks were far less common and mostly dealt with the meta
| processes like searching national inventory, special
| corporate account data, things like that. All the day to day
| was in the TUI
| 1718627440 wrote:
| There is no reason a TUI couldn't do this. Calling another
| program is easier in a TUI, since it is one step nearer to
| execve and a shell. If it is in a file, then opening another
| program isn't hard.
|
| > The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and
| is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our
| users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
|
| Run another Linux VM on the client. /s
|
| Aren't there X servers for Windows? I remembered installing
| one on a locked down university computer for fun.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| > I will say that these systems take time and effort to learn.
| You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't too
| hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have to
| memorize a lot of product metadata.
|
| One thing that often gets lost in the discussion of TUIs vs
| GUIs is that this is also true of GUIs. You have to know which
| icon to click, and it's not always in the same place, and not
| always labeled. Increasingly, functionality is hidden behind a
| hamburger menu, and not laid out in logical sections like File,
| Edit, View, etc menus.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| The cool thing about TUIs is that everything has an explicit
| label because it _has_ to be this way.
|
| On the system I use, every menu item was prefixed with a
| number. You punch in that number on the keyboard and you're
| in that menu. Just absolutely beautiful functionality
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I had a summer job in a place with one of these. When I
| started, I was like "how does this guy know the 15 digit
| number for these screws?" By the end, I know the code for
| screws in general, the code for popular types,
| metric/imperial, and then it was like length and size. The
| numbers flashed up as well, so you wouldn't have to
| memorize anything, but you quickly didn't need to see the
| numbers for popular items.
| titzer wrote:
| This is the way. The "bicycle for your mind" that Jobs
| wanted. It augments your memory and enhances everything
| you do, and at every step you quickly internalize a
| system that doesn't change according to the whims of far-
| distant web devs.
| iso1631 wrote:
| GUIs used to have this too of course. Alt-F to bring up the
| file menu, the hotkey was underlined.
|
| That seems to have slowly vanished over the last 30 years
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I still have this and I loath programs that breaks this
| consistency by shipping their own graphics toolkit
| stacks. This is a reason for me to deinstall a program
| and never use it again. Programs that are not 3D games or
| specialized CAD programs should only be allowed to use
| the OS graphics stack and nothing else. (This includes
| programs shipped by the OS vendor.)
| titzer wrote:
| IMHO touchscreens just seem to keep falling into the same
| traps. Here's a big pile of unlabeled mysterious buttons with
| cryptic icons, at least one of which will probably ruin
| whatever you're doing without being able to go back. How do I
| know what it will do? Paw at it meekly and hope for the best!
| egypturnash wrote:
| > We've really lost something very important with the shift to
| GUI and the shunning of text mode.
|
| GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work
| two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left
| hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons
| control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than
| the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right
| hand because I don't know its shortcuts, I feel like half my
| brain's idling.
| CalRobert wrote:
| We solved this with mnemonics (underlined letter is the
| shortcut) but then got rid of them for some reason
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| I love the system in Autodesk Animator (now:
| https://github.com/AnimatorPro). Every menu item or button
| currently on the screen always have a unique initial
| letter. There is no need to highlight or underline
| anything. Amazingly this was done without having to use any
| too obscure labels (but I doubt it would be fun to try to
| translate it to other languages). Almost every function is
| two or three single letter key-presses away, and after
| using the application for a while you will have memorized
| more and more of those.
|
| Some frequently used functions have their own special
| single-key shortcuts as well, so instead of having to press
| C-P (to open the Clip menu and then select Paste) you can
| just press the ' key, saving the user a key-press every
| time they do that.
| bnug wrote:
| Oh yeah - AutoCAD by Autodesk was also like this. Once
| you memorized the keystrokes, you could fly through your
| line drawing.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I recently rediscovered that I can do GUI menu things on
| the keyboard in apps like VLC. Feels like a magic trick --
| the best of both worlds. Was it the move to phones that did
| it? Or did most people not use alt shortcuts?
| mrweasel wrote:
| You see this a lot with videos editors. A professional video
| editor flies around in their software of choice like an sales
| person in a TUI. Both are inherently proficient with their
| tool, to the extend that it's hard to graps what's actually
| happening on screen. We also see this with editors and IDE.
| Some people cruise around Emacs or Vim, while other hit a few
| keys and Visual Studio or IntelliJ will refactor 500 lines of
| code in an instant.
|
| The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can
| navigate and input faster than the program can render. So you
| vaguely see a screen change, a menu move or an overlay pop
| up, only to instantly disappear. The user doesn't need to
| know what's happening on screen, because they trust their
| fingers and the system to do the right thing.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can
| navigate and input faster than the program can render. So
| you vaguely see a screen change, a menu move or an overlay
| pop up, only to instantly disappear. The user doesn't need
| to know what's happening on screen, because they trust
| their fingers and the system to do the right thing.
|
| I learned this while creating some autohotkey scripts: I
| could have the macro click before the button was shown on
| the screen.
|
| This also created some problems where users would
| unintentionally hit their scroll wheel after clicking and
| change a 1 to a 7 on the next screen before it even
| appeared. That wasn't good...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can
| navigate and input faster than the program can render.
|
| Yes, but the it's not due to slow rendering speed. GUIs
| render even slower.
| bitwize wrote:
| Movie editors are as persnickety about their editing
| software as we are about ours, it turns out, for many of
| the same reasons: we accumulate years of proficiency with a
| tool and don't want to have to retrain in something else
| without a clear head-and-shoulders advantage.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| This is about keyboard navigation rather than TUI vs GUI, there
| is no reason you have to render your app with plain text to
| support efficient keyboard nav.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| That's true, but if the use case is to display text and to
| optimize keyboard navigation, then the added complexity of a
| GUI might be unnecessary.
|
| Variable width fonts and style sheets are nice, though.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| It's also from an era where you used one piece of software
| doing routine tasks that rarely changed.
|
| Imagine learning all the keyboard shortcuts for every website
| you use nowadays.
|
| For example I worked at a video store long ago that had some
| dos program to manage everything, I didn't own a computer and
| I didn't use any other software. It was still often a slow
| turd, and it wasn't networked with the 2 other local stores,
| so if I wanted to know if a customer had an account there, or
| if they had some stock there, I had to call.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Imagine if all the websites would render to semantic html
| and the browser would provide the interface. The problem is
| not the concept of websites.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It also is about designing things around a single buffered
| input stream. There is no reason GUIs couldn't do this, but
| most don't.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Similar story.
|
| I worked for a medium sized company who did work with Toro. We
| supplied many of their lubricants and they had TUI they still
| used on one of their machines to enter the orders from our
| company. It was the last of their legacy products, but worked
| incredibly well. We had very little issues ever with the
| system. Our Oracle ERP Net Suite? Had three people dedicated to
| making sure it ran smoothly. I still remember some of the guys
| I used to talk to at Toro were "lifers" who were always talking
| about how easier things were before all the SAAS and ERP
| software came on the scene.
|
| The stories they had were pretty entertaining.
| ilaksh wrote:
| You're right to point out the speed, but it is just not true
| that GUIs can't be fast. You can have screens that load quickly
| and shortcut keys etc.
|
| You just have to make fast navigation and data entry a high
| priority. The assumptions and approaches people make today mean
| that generally isn't the case. With a TUI there is a hard limit
| on the amount of data you can load and that helps as a starting
| point.
|
| - Often it's hitting a server is that is far away rather in the
| same building. - you can put the web server in
| the same building
|
| - Each page is very heavy with lots of JavaScript etc. loading
| - you can build lightweight web pages if you priority small
| script size, minimal dependencies, and do profiling to
| keep things in check
|
| - Data loading delays rendering - limit the
| amount of data loaded and displayed at one time
|
| - Data is slow to load - an older system has
| limited capacity meaning it's not an option to keep inactive
| data around - this means data is more likely to be
| indexed - new systems have very large storage capacities,
| leading to a larger and larger growing db - eventually
| default configuration for the database does not allow for
| everything active to be indexed - solution is to keep
| inactive data out of active tables being queried for normal
| operations
|
| - Slow to navigate with mouse - you can create
| a keyboard navigation system - you can build keyboard
| shortcuts into every screen - you can create autocomplete
| shortcut commands to jump to screens
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| At work we recently moved from Jira to Linear. It it fully
| keyboard navigatable and has shortcuts for pretty much
| everything. It's great! For me the only downside is that al
| that keyboard greatness clashes with my Vimium browser
| extension. Oh well...
| c22 wrote:
| Many years ago I used a TUI retail/inventory terminal that
| was running in an SSH session over a painfully slow wireless
| link. Each keystroke came with several seconds of latency.
| This was not a problem, though, since I'd memorized all the
| important menu sequences. I could just punch in a rapid-fire
| string of keyboard strokes representing an entire transaction
| and then just wait a few moments for the screens to catch up
| and a receipt to print.
| endgame wrote:
| I think this is one of the deepest problems with modern UIs
| - event delivery is no longer reliable. You type "abc" and
| only "ac" gets delivered to the application, or "b" ends up
| sent to another window. Maddening.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I do this to this day, over a crappy kilobyte line via
| Phone via Bluetooth and it works great.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > You just have to make fast navigation and data entry a high
| priority. The assumptions and approaches people make today
| mean that generally isn't the case.
|
| Indeed. Most developers today make their own easiness of
| development the priority, not anything related to the end
| user's experience. This is why software is so bloated and
| slow, but the pernicious idea of "developer experience
| matters more than speed" doesn't seem to be going away any
| time soon.
| andrehacker wrote:
| When we built systems in the early 90's (non web GUI), typical
| requirements were that login/startup would at most take a few
| seconds and any user action would have to be satisfied with sub
| second response time. I often think about that when I am
| waiting for the third SSO redirection to complete or the web
| page to complete its 200 web requests after a single click. We
| gained a lot but efficiency seems to have taken a backseat in
| many cases.
| kotaKat wrote:
| When Lowes made the shift off their in-house TUI point-of-sale
| to a GUI I heard a _lot_ of fallout from the hardcore TUI users
| losing their keyboard menuing. Stores and people would build
| their own "cheat sheets" to fly around the system and it became
| almost a second language to get to know the TUI.
|
| Knowing that 1.5.6 sends you to scheduling a pickup, or 11.1 to
| get into the credit card application, versus hunting through
| graphical hell with a mouse and a touchscreen.
| tarsinge wrote:
| Maybe because there are other usages than business data entry
| and programming? I don't think I'd be more productive when say
| editing pictures/movies or producing music with a text
| interface. Maybe it's because I grew up with classic Mac OS but
| computers were not only about productivity, they were a place,
| and UX peaked with Spatial Finder. Nowadays I spend my working
| days mostly in text mode and I feel like I've lost something.
| patmcc wrote:
| I worked at a big-box retailer before figuring out a career.
| They had an old-school TUI that was incredibly fast and well
| designed. Function keys to do all kinds of lookups and
| adjustments, advanced menus when you needed them, overall just
| a well designed system. People took a week or so to get the
| hang of it but then the skill ceiling was insane, people could
| get _fast_.
|
| A few months before I left they switched to a "modern" GUI. It
| was shockingly bad. The speed of _every_ transaction lowered.
| Even with optimal use it just took longer. So much time wasted.
| radley wrote:
| > UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago.
|
| I'm going to push back a little on that. For several years,
| MacOS followed a strong UX convention with consistent keyboard
| shortcuts, menus, layout order, and more. Similarly, Microsoft
| started with the same, but with everything reversed. At the
| time, most major cross-platform apps followed these
| conventions.
|
| Two periods broke these rules: the expansion of web apps and
| Apple's pivot towards the consolidation of everything into iOS.
|
| First was the dawn of web apps. Faced with two opposing
| standards, web apps didn't know which model to follow. Business
| sites stuck with MS standards, while design-centric sites
| followed Mac standards. As those broke consistency, cross-
| platform apps gave up and defined their own standards.
|
| Mobile platforms tried to establish new standards. iOS was
| mostly successful, but started slipping around iOS 7. Material
| Design was supposed to standardize Android, but Google used it
| for all Google products, making it more of a standard for the
| Google brand than Android.
|
| The second started around WWDC 2019. At that point, Apple
| deprioritized UX standards to focus on architecture updates.
| The following year, Catalyst was literally a UX catalyst,
| introducing two competing UX standards for MacOS. From that
| point forward, Apple really hasn't had a singular UX standard
| to follow anymore, but they seem to be marching towards iOS
| standards for all devices.
| palmotea wrote:
| > > UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago.
|
| > I'm going to push back a little on that. For several years,
| MacOS followed a strong UX convention with consistent
| keyboard shortcuts, menus, layout order, and more. Similarly,
| Microsoft started with the same, but with everything
| reversed. At the time, most major cross-platform apps
| followed these conventions.
|
| I used Mac OS during that era. While in many ways it was
| better than the GUIs we have _now_ , using the mouse was an
| _absolute must_ , which prevented it from ever getting as
| efficient as a TUI. Yes there were keyboard shortcuts, but
| they were never sufficient to use the machine or any
| application without a mouse. Also they had to be _completely
| memorized_ to be useful.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| What is one of the advantages of TUIs is that every action is
| deserialized from a common stream and that stream is
| buffered. This means both an advantage for speed, but also
| for a simplification for interaction, since if the user wants
| it, the information can flow in one direction only and the
| other direction happens only when the user wants it.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Times have changed. Priorities have changed.
|
| In the heyday of TUIs, job attrition was much lower. It made
| sense to create a tool that was extremely hard to use, but also
| extremely efficient once learned.
|
| In the modern days, attrition is much higher, especially in
| retail. You need to focus on discoverability and simplifying
| training as much as possible. Efficiency is secondary at best.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Attrition is higher overall for sure, but retail stores
| always had high turnover--temporary workers, seasonal
| workers, high school kids etc...
|
| If you've seen any of the GUI retail tools that replaced the
| TUIs, they certainly aren't designed for discoverability.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Times have changed. Priorities have changed.
|
| I think what actually happened was technology changed. GUIs
| became _possible_ , and therefore most designers made GUIs
| without much if any thought (because many assume newer ==
| better). Now you'd be hard pressed to even build a TUI, since
| most know only how to build GUIs and all the tools are GUI
| focused.
|
| > In the modern days, attrition is much higher, especially in
| retail. You need to focus on discoverability and simplifying
| training as much as possible. Efficiency is secondary at
| best.
|
| That sounds like a post-hoc justification. Also higher
| attrition doesn't just happen like the weather. Deliberate
| decisions lead to it.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| There is nothing stopping someone from designing GUI stemming
| from same rules. It just won't "look pretty" and be easy to
| sell to the suits.
|
| There is also trend with "modern" UI/UX to focus near entirety
| of effort on user's first few minutes and first few hours with
| a software, while near zero thought is being put on users
| having to use given piece of software for hours at end, day in,
| day out
| bitwize wrote:
| I definitely see cash register/POS systems like this out in
| the wild, replete with ugly fonts, Windows 3.x style buttons,
| and even F-key legends at the bottom. So somebody somewhere
| is thinking of the poor cashiers.
|
| The entire GUI was sold on it being easy to use for
| beginners. There's a reason why keybindings are today called
| "shortcuts": Steve Jobs's diktat was that the primary means
| of giving commands to the Mac was the mouse. Anything you can
| do on a Mac (except for entering text) was to be done with,
| and designed around, the mouse. Keyboard "shortcuts", so
| called as a quicker way to issue (some, but not all) menu
| commands, were a sop to power users but really were an
| addition, not essential to use of the program.
|
| Windows, by contrast, was designed to be keyboard-accessible.
| Not all PCs in 1985 had mice...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I still work on a system where it sometimes says to press
| F17 to do something...
|
| And no, we don't have the glorious keyboards from that time
| :( just standard 104s
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I once booted Windows 2003, it is crazy how you can
| intuitively interact with it via keyboard, without being
| familiar with that UI or ever having used a computer from
| even that era. It takes like ~40seconds to figure it out
| after trial and error.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| > while near zero thought is being put on users having to use
| given piece of software for hours at end, day in, day out
|
| And those users want more batch creation and editing.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu
| item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software
| becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how
| fast you can physically push the buttons.
|
| Oh, I've been a new hire at places like this.
|
| The day1 stuff in the system will be logically or coherently
| placed (e.g. alphabetically) and then the rest will be
| incrementally added on top.
|
| The menu options will go like this:
|
| 1. Alpha
|
| 2. Bravo
|
| 3. Charlie
|
| 4. Turbo-Bravo
|
| 5. Charlie-Undo
|
| 6. AAAlpha
|
| Great for day1 users that are still there and started with just
| 3 options but new users are screwed. The arrangement started to
| stop making sense circa 1995.
|
| I've seen the same thing where parts shelves were sorted by
| manufacturer (to make re-ordering by manufacturer simple).
|
| When they moved to automatic inventory, shelves didn't matter
| anymore and if a part was made by manu1 but now manu2, they'd
| keep putting it with manu1 because "that's where everyone's
| gone to look for it for the part 20 years".
|
| All you had to know was who made that part in 2003 when auto-
| inventory stopped forcing them to be consistent by manufacturer
| to know which shelf to pick from. Easy!
|
| New hires get screwed and over time nothing makes sense
| anymore.
| fakedang wrote:
| > It's absolutely crazy that a well designed TUI is so much
| faster. It turns out that if you never change the UI and every
| menu item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software
| becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how
| fast you can physically push the buttons.
|
| Bloomberg Terminal basically. And then because of muscle
| memory, it's so hard for users to get used to another system.
| And then they push it onto their juniors. And then you get to
| charge companies $250 per head to train juniors on how to use
| the system, with all of its textbased commands.
| prmoustache wrote:
| A single $250 payment per head for training is quite cheap if
| you consider the hours saved at not waiting for awfully slow
| SSO redirections to complete and web page refresh.
| titzer wrote:
| This times 1000x. I dream of an alternate path we could have
| taken where TUI and keyboard input was the _default_ and all
| the fancy GUI stuff was put to good use _where it 's needed_.
| In retrospect it's ludicrous that we have to use a pixel-
| perfect pointing device to amble slowly over to whereever the
| designers put their menus/toolbars/icons, context menus. Select
| from a list? I have like 50 keys that could do the job!
| berbec wrote:
| A client i work for used a Pick system and it's maintained by one
| dude. He's in his 60s, so who knows how long they'll be able to
| get support...
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system
| IshKebab wrote:
| > It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick
|
| Wikipedia vandals these days...
| sverhagen wrote:
| There's a completely unironic obituary linked from the LA
| Times from 1994, which makes me wonder if the scandalous
| meaning even existed yet in those days?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Well it started with smartphones, so no.
| urnicus wrote:
| Hahahahahaha - the kids are alright
| xmcp123 wrote:
| Dick Pick, initially released on GIRLS.
|
| Wow
| trbleclef wrote:
| My dad recently retired but his company was still using Pick as
| of a year or two ago. They also had a one-dude maintenance
| plan. I wonder if it was the same dude.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| My first job out of college was over 2 decades ago, and I was
| hired to work on a web app which was considered new
| technology. But an important application there that was used
| by hundreds of people around the country was written with
| Pick, and the owner of the company also had some local
| Houston businesses whose Pick applications he occasionally
| did maintenance work on. The owner had moved from Chicago to
| Houston at the beginning of the 80s because he was able to
| get a high-paying job with no degree, but when the oil bust
| happened he learned Pick programming from an older guy and
| did so well when he started his own business that he retired
| early.
| nivethan wrote:
| So many of these systems were one man shops. It really speaks
| to how easy to develop pick systems was. It still very much
| is.
| matthewpick wrote:
| I should become a maintainer to keep the legacy going...
| nivethan wrote:
| I work on a bunch of Pick systems :) Love it all and we're
| still doing active development. (Feel free to send me an
| e-mail, we pick up orphaned systems)
|
| If anyone wants to take a look, here are some links:
|
| Open source version: https://github.com/geneb/ScarletDME
|
| The last version of true pick: https://github.com/Krowemoh/R83
| johnohara wrote:
| Anyone who has ever worked with legit 10-key operators
| understands why many companies were loathe to migrate to modern
| graphical interfaces.
|
| Some of the fastest manual data entry I've ever seen was by
| operators entering claim information into a medical billing
| system based on MUMPS.
|
| Keep all hands and feet away.
| baruchel wrote:
| I wrote the main application for my wife's business -- she's a
| psychologist. That was only a few years ago, but as a senior
| lecturer in the more theoretical parts of computer science, I
| never really needed fancy UIs with flashy graphical effects. So I
| built a core engine and used the classic dialog tool as the thin
| user-facing layer.
|
| At first, my wife was pretty disappointed -- as a computer
| science teacher, wasn't I supposed to know how to build a "real"
| app? But a few years later, she doesn't want anything else. I
| even offered to have one of my students create a nicer UI without
| changing the engine or database, but by now she's completely used
| to the terminal menus.
|
| The tool keeps a database, collects data through dialog forms,
| generates PDF invoices with groff, and launches Thunderbird when
| needed (to send invoices, etc.).
| urnicus wrote:
| <At first, my wife was pretty disappointed
|
| I've got a mental picture of you excitedly unveiling your work
| to her. Glad she came around and very cool.
| outime wrote:
| Leroy Merlin (French multinational retail company, home
| improvement and gardening products) still runs these systems at
| the PoS, at least in Spain.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Wegmans' cash registers still use a TUI. It looks quite clean and
| friendly compared to the GUI-heavy slop of, say, my time at a
| major retailer. Speaking of nostalgia, my old gaming store also
| used a TUI for transactions, and it was highly responsive for
| anything local (and a PITA anytime it had to communicate with the
| CO). Also been exposed to a number of businesses these past few
| years who still use old AIX/Unix/TUI boxes for critical business
| functions, and most seem happy with them.
|
| And therein lies the rub: if the process works, and modern
| software doesn't necessarily offer any better value proposition,
| then there's no real reason to migrate. For a _lot_ of companies,
| the status quo might literally be all they'll ever need, and IT's
| role is to just keep it up, available, and secure as times
| change. Sure, I'll side-eye a theater using a Windows box as an
| intermediary for Ticketmaster to run transactions against their
| old AIX rig collecting dust in a corner of a closet, but if it
| works and it's secure, well, more power to them keeping costs
| down.
|
| The advice I'd give is not to knock something just because it
| doesn't fit current narratives around technology. Our jobs -
| first and foremost - are to build and support solutions that
| amplify productivity of humans in a way they can use without
| external support; whether it's an ancient TUI or a modern GUI
| isn't as relevant as its efficacy.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It's been a while since I worked at a bank, but most there core
| stuff was running in a mainframe and while "modern" front ends
| exist, the core work uses terminal access.
|
| A key thing modern replacements lose is the input buffer: One can
| type multiple screens ahead. In a modern GUI application I can
| enter a shortcut, but then have to wait till the corresponding
| view/popup/window appears and registered it's event handlers till
| I can put in the next command. In a mainframe-style TUI, if I
| remember the sequence, I can type ahead the shortcuts and input
| for next screen(s) before it's ready. For the experienced user,
| who runs the same sequence often this is really efficient.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Costco still runs its warehouse operations on a TUI application
| running on AS/400 machines. At least the ones in Canada but I
| heard it's the same for the US warehouses.
| iveqy wrote:
| I built my own ERP system for handling my business. It's also an
| TUI and has been here on Hacker News a few times.
|
| About training new staff, there's actually studies done on it:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2655855/
|
| My 2 cents is that GUI is good for exploring new software, while
| TUI is wonderful if you already have a mental map of what you're
| doing. So for everyday used software I would definitely hope that
| more TUI's where used.
| urnicus wrote:
| Super interesting study. Training new staff was always the most
| challenging aspect of the software.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I made a simple biz app for a friend, with dotnet C# but as a
| TUI. Seemed the easiest to teach.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Quite a few large businesses are still running code that was
| originally written for mainframes in the 60s and 70s. Usually it
| is large batch operations, but I know of at least two fortune 100
| companies that still have non-technical users running terminal
| emulators to connect to their 'mainframe' to perform some tasks.
|
| I was about to say that's what keeps Sungard in business, but
| then I googled and saw they are no longer in business. So maybe
| it is starting to die down.
| xnx wrote:
| Textbook example of a piece of software being a shark (perfectly
| adapted over millennia to being a perfect predator) not a
| dinosaur (obsolete/extinct).
| nairboon wrote:
| That's a great analogy! "Sharkware"
| perlgeek wrote:
| Yes, we still have a TUI to our core CMDB and billing. With 500+
| employees, not everybody is happy with it, so we also built an
| API and a web app to access and manipulate the most central data.
|
| But, we also have some power users who absolutely swear by it,
| and we offer some power user features for them :-)
|
| * full readline integration, so there's a command history, Ctrl-R
| reverse search in the command history etc.
|
| * tab completion for many prompts
|
| * a generic system where outputs can be redirected to a pager, a
| physical printer, "wc" (word count), into a file etc.
|
| * tabular data also has an alternative CSV representation
|
| * generic fast-jump into menus. This works by supplying commands
| on the command line, and transitioning to interactive mode when
| the command list has run out
|
| This is all built in-house; the first git commit is from 1997 but
| that was "import from CVS" and already 20k LoC, so the actual
| origins go back further.
|
| It's written in Perl with no framework, just libraries.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| I think you are about a decade off on your first git commit,
| unless you meant they went cvs -> svn or something and then
| ended up on git later.
| perlgeek wrote:
| There might have been another VCS involved in between, dunno
| if it was SVN.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| The last time I went to Steve's Music Store (Toronto, Canada)
| they were still using the green on black terminals. This was pre-
| pandemic. Maybe someone can confirm if they still are.
| andix wrote:
| Until recently I helped running an old Clipper/dBase TUI
| application from the late 80s for a family member. We managed to
| run it successfully until they retired.
|
| vDos (vdos.info) was a huge life saver for this application. It's
| similar to DOSBox, but more tailored to business applications.
| The big issue was always to find compatible printers for the old
| application, vDOS includes some emulation to print to any Windows
| printer.
|
| There might be free alternatives to vDos, but it worked very well
| and is reasonably priced.
|
| PS: we also tried to recompile the Clipper source code with
| Harbour to modern targets. It looked very promising, but they
| were extremely happy with the vDos solution, which only took 2
| hours to deploy.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Thanks for the link, afaik my clients are still stuck using
| their old DOS TUI in a windows 7 VM that has no network access
| andix wrote:
| I've been there, this doesn't work well at all. Actually
| since Windows NT the DOS subsystem is already an emulation,
| and it's not that good. DOS applications worked really well
| up to Windows ME, but with NT/XP/7 it got worse.
|
| vDos was overall much better than running DOS applications
| directly on Windows. Only drawback was performance. It never
| ran as fast as on a Pentium III with Windows 98, but still
| much faster than the original hardware it was designed for
| (~30 mhz 80386).
|
| Our application was designed for Novell NetWare, back then it
| even supported row/table locks for dBase files on the shared
| network drive. This didn't work with Windows NT anymore. But
| vDos brought back the feature to Windows 10 and SMB shares!
| dardeaup wrote:
| What type of business was it? What kind of functionality did
| this TUI application provide?
| andix wrote:
| It was a customer management and billing system, for a
| specific industry. Tailored to local requirements and
| insurance regulations (a lot of things got billed to
| insurance). There is commercial software available for this
| purpose, but it's a very small target group, and the products
| are neither great, nor cheap.
|
| Over time it even got extended to interface with a few
| external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to
| specific locations.
|
| It was deployed on one location with 2-5 concurrent users on
| the same database. The workflow was something like this: open
| customer/new customer, read/add notes, register
| products/services provided, print invoice for customer, print
| monthly invoice for insurance companies including all the
| required information (hundreds of pages).
| kotaKat wrote:
| > a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing
| text files to specific locations
|
| The joys of large business transactions handled by .txt
| files (or equivalent) over FTP (or equivalent). It almost
| feels... like digital fax, in a way.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Huge swathes of business software run on stuff built in the 80s
| and 90s with only incremental changes since.
| ufko_org wrote:
| This is absolutely impossible in the EU where law is changed 100x
| times per day. You simply wouldn't comply.
| gjvc wrote:
| this should video of the use of IBM CallPath on an AS/400 should
| get you all misty-eyed https://youtu.be/5pY6Xxptp9A?t=2058
| conductr wrote:
| > I got my start as a script kiddie writing automations for this
| system with Microsoft Access, VBA, and SendKeys to automate data
| entry
|
| I've done exactly this for the likes of JP Morgan Chase. Many of
| their core banking systems are some COBOL/Fortran mainframe (that
| I know nothing about) but the interface through a TUI client.
| When they have a desire to work in a more modern fashion, it's
| SendKeys to the rescue. There's definitely still a lot of TUI's
| that run the world.
| atoav wrote:
| I manage the roomaccess of my workshop via a custom TUI
| application . Works flawlessly.
| jackhuman wrote:
| I recall guitar center is still on a green screen back when I
| worked there in my youth. It was pretty fun learning that
| interface, fancy keyboard shortcuts etc.
| privong wrote:
| An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic
| to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient
| for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the
| modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee
| retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working
| hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be
| faster/easier and that could work against TUI and keyboard-based
| tools.
|
| Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in
| comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should
| look like.
| urnicus wrote:
| This is a definite reality and headache. The learning curve was
| steep and I literally had somebody walk out after training them
| for less than two hours.
| avidiax wrote:
| It's also quite common that the customer is now the one that
| drives the interface.
|
| It's the customer's time wasted by the UI, but also the
| customer typically can't be expected to perform enough orders
| to actually learn a complicated interface.
|
| TUIs persist in industries where there is specialized knowledge
| needed to even complete the order. For example, an
| optometrist's office.
| privong wrote:
| I was thinking about employee-facing tools, but I agree that
| TUIs present an even bigger challenge for casual users /
| customers.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I don't think it's an either/or situation.
|
| An application I worked on was a GUI but (at the user's
| request) we loaded that thing up with hotkeys like no other.
|
| Watching experienced employees operate a gui I worked on was a
| fascinating experience. They were so fucking fast!
|
| I think the problem is that GUI authors often put hotkeys in as
| an afterthought.
| amatecha wrote:
| The other thing is that GUIs can be very slow to load,
| limiting the potential speed/efficiency. One of the most
| frustrating experiences is pressing a series of key commands
| (or just single keys) that SHOULD have performed a very
| specific series of actions, but the software lagged behind at
| some point(s) in the flow and something ended up getting
| messed up because my series of key presses resulted in a
| totally unintended action.
| flomo wrote:
| What I heard from one large chain is they couldn't train
| warehouse employees on the green screen (3270) inventory app,
| its too different for them. They just wouldn't do it or would
| quit.
| mrngm wrote:
| Most, if not all, Asian take-out / restaurants in NL still use a
| TUI for registering your order. Several motorcyle retailers in NL
| use a TUI for parts management, invoicing, repair tracking. In
| both cases, people operating these systems develop muscle memory
| for their everyday usage. I'm not sure if it's still in use, but
| for at least a decade since 2005 or so, the local university's
| student canteen used an in-house developed TUI for selling snacks
| and drinks.
|
| And if you stretch the definition of TUI a bit, the Bloomberg
| terminal is a fascinating example.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I think the Bloomberg terminal counts as a TUI. It's also
| probably the most complex and heavily used TUI in existence.
| angiolillo wrote:
| > if you stretch the definition of TUI a bit, the Bloomberg
| terminal is a fascinating example
|
| The Bloomberg Terminal uses several different UI methodologies
| depending on use case -- many functions (applications) are
| absolutely TUIs whereas Launchpad is more mouse-driven.
|
| > In both cases, people operating these systems develop muscle
| memory for their everyday usage.
|
| I worked as a UX designer at Bloomberg and when we had to
| modify existing functions we were careful to maintain shortcuts
| and keyboard navigation. In a couple cases we even ended up re-
| implementing UI bugs that one or more users had grown
| accustomed to. I've never worked anywhere quite so committed to
| backward UI compatibility, but that came at the expense of a
| steep learning curve.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I remember going to the Pasadena Public Library as a kid (90s)
| and there were terminals everywhere for interfacing with the
| digital card catalog system. Pretty sure they were made by
| Digital/DEC. The black screens with orange glowing text were such
| a pleasure to play around with. I've been thinking it would be
| fun to have one of these in my house 24x7 to interface with a
| Home Assistant TUI.
| LocalH wrote:
| Was it Dynix by chance?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_%28software%29
| whalesalad wrote:
| I struggle to remember myself... but I found this earlier
| today:
|
| "The years of 1995 and 1996 brought many technological
| improvements to the Library including the addition of
| InfoTrac SearchBank, a computerized magazine and newspaper
| index; ADVANCE, a new Unix-based online library catalog;
| public access to the Internet with terminals at all library
| locations;"
|
| ADVANCE: https://librarytechnology.org/document/4772
|
| InfoTrac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoTrac
| stronglikedan wrote:
| My buddy works at a rather large auto auction and uses a TUI
| extensively, only jumping out to copy stuff from a few GUIs and
| pasting it into the TUI.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Costco. Go to a supervisor in a red vest and ask what other
| Costco has the item that has stocked out and you'll see. No idea
| what the backend is but the app they use is a terminal emulator
| that looks straight out of the late 80's.
| kitrose wrote:
| AS400 I think
| hyperpl wrote:
| Looks like an AS/400
| Aloha wrote:
| AS400 in their case
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Here's a photo for anyone curious:
|
| https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/111839478303640635
|
| It's also worth noting that the original mainframe hardware has
| likely been virtualized at this point. Used to work for a
| company that was doing a lot of that around 15 years ago
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _that the original mainframe hardware has likely been
| virtualized at this point_
|
| The as400 is a mini-computer, the high end of this line
| overlaps the low end of mainframe.
|
| When I did some consulting work out there many years ago,
| they had a network of the largest as400's that IBM makes,
| connected together in one image.
|
| Regarding virtualization: It would have to be on IBM's power
| processors. IBM does offer cloud services running as400, I
| have no info on whether Costco is using that or not.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| It's a network of high end as400's, the software is custom.
|
| They've burned multiple 100's of millions of dollars on
| multiple projects trying to re-develop and move off as400's,
| but they just pulled the plug on their most recent project a
| year or two ago.
|
| The biggest issue with adoption on new system (based on
| insiders I've talked to) is that the existing system is very
| efficient for people knowledgeable about how to use it and the
| newer GUI based systems just don't match it.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah I actually help out a friend's family business a lot and we
| recently had to fix the program for something. It's a foxpro
| application rewritten in '89 from an original dBase port from
| earlier in the 80s. I legit had to bust out radare2 and
| hexdump(analysis)/hex fiend(editing) in order to get the changes
| done because the original programmer passed away (RIP). Was quite
| the learning experience but I'm glad that things were simple
| enough back then to make it something like an easy introduction
| into the world of reverse engineering for money.
|
| I've seen even older in use. There's an auto parts store in the
| capital city of Costa Rica which was still running dBase III for
| its inventory system on a green phosphor screen IBM PC. Not sure
| if that store is around post-pandemic but it certainly was
| running around 4 or 5 years ago. Wish I got a video but it's in a
| particularly sketchy area that I don't really have any reason to
| return to.
|
| Also, if anyone else ever has to dump an old database to CSV or
| whatever, I found perl to be the best tool for the job as it
| handles old encodings just fine. You can go from ancient database
| to spreadsheet really easy this way. Here's the ticket:
|
| https://www.burtonsys.com/download/dbf2csv.php
| urnicus wrote:
| What a lucky friend - you're a superhero.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I just like to hack shit
| H1Supreme wrote:
| > https://www.burtonsys.com/download/dbf2csv.php
|
| Man, this would have came in handy when I was trying to extract
| data from .dbf files. Ended up writing something in Go while
| referencing the dBase IV spec. Lots of trial and error as I
| recall.
| andix wrote:
| PHP used to have dBase database support. Also older version
| of Excel can just open dBase. LibreOffice seems to support it
| too.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-
| US/text/scalc/guide/d...
|
| Hahaha this woulda saved me some time. We considered
| porting the app to be a web app but after some time it was
| obvious that wouldn't have been as good
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| There's a few tools out there, another one I tried in Common
| Lisp but it was a horrible pain in the ass to get working.
| Figured to search for perl scripts because it's pretty much
| fine with old as hell encodings (latin-1) as it was
| originally developed contemporary to those, and that came up.
| There's also this, but it was written for dBase III and idk
| how well it works with fox pro
|
| https://linux.die.net/man/1/dbview
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I don't know if they're still using it but around 2010 or so a
| client from the early 2000s got in touch because the UPS they
| were using for their SCO Unix + serial terminals server had
| failed and they wanted to replace it. I was amazed that they were
| still using it. I was even more amazed that the APC UPS they were
| going to replace the old one with... had a new version of the SCO
| UPS Monitoring application that they used to automatically do a
| clean shut down of the server if the power was out too long. Got
| them all set up and everything kept humming along.
| InMice wrote:
| When i checkout at costco i see their TUI and im so curious about
| it.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| My parents' small businesses still run an xBase-based TUI
| accounting application for GL, AP, AR, and payroll they first
| purchased in 1988. Other than a Y2K update it has run unchanged
| since it was originally installed. Today I have to use DOSBox to
| make it run but it still works great. I've scabbed-on a few
| quality-of-life updates (mainly by capturing and processing print
| jobs) but it mostly just does its thing.
|
| As you'd expect with having a TUI the users can absolutely fly
| through it. It's extremely efficient for them.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| No, but I learned yesterday that a carpenter and renovation
| person I know uses a GUI software from 1996 called "FloorPlan
| Plus 3D 3.01" [1] to design furniture before he builds it. He has
| a dusty old laptop running Windows XP on which the only thing
| that works is this software and the connection to the printer.
|
| He showed me his workflow in detail. It's a beautiful software
| that does everything he needs.
|
| And notice it's only 3.8 MB - smaller than many SaaS software
| webpages that offer lesser functionality.
|
| [1]
| https://vetusware.com/download/FloorPlan%20Plus%203D%203.01/...
| OJFord wrote:
| Loads of woodworking is done on SketchUp version whatever
| that's pre-cloud licensing, dating from 2008 I believe. (Cloud
| _aversion_ , if you will.)
|
| Picasa & Earth era desktop Google software.
| danhau wrote:
| I remember using those pre-cloud versions. I loved them.
| Sketchup was so intuitive (as a 3D modelling noob) it was
| ridiculous. My tool of choice for making 3D levels for my
| various OpenGL projects.
|
| I tried to do some rudimentary modelling with modern day
| Blender and failed. It's quite the juggernaut to learn.
|
| What software today do people recommend as an alternative to
| Sketchup? Is the cloud version any good?
| jcoby wrote:
| > What software today do people recommend as an alternative
| to Sketchup?
|
| onshape (web; free to use unless you want to protect your
| designs) and fusion (autodesk; free license available) are
| both really popular right now. they work differently than
| sketchup. i never really made friends with sketchup but the
| parametric modeling system used in fusion and onshape
| clicked with me and i really enjoy using them.
| ponderings wrote:
| I remember running Sketchup for the first time. I had zero
| experience but in less than 20 minutes I was drawing large
| complicated machinery, tractors, buildings.
|
| They made a 3d drawing application without a learning curve
| O_O
| foresto wrote:
| A bit of searching turns up lots of references to SketchUp
| Make 2017. Could this be what you mean?
| tech234a wrote:
| IIRC SketchUp 8 (released in 2010) was the last version
| released by Google, which had licensing allowing commercial
| use of the free version. After the sale to Trimble, later
| versions of SketchUp 8 and all future free versions become
| for non-commercial use only. SketchUp Make 2017 was the
| last free version that could run locally.
| sorenjan wrote:
| All three were bought by Google, they didn't start there.
| mbreese wrote:
| IIRC that version made it really easy to design things with
| dimensional lumber. 2x4"s, 2x6"s etc. I have vague
| recollections of designing a dog house that way from that
| time period.
|
| I'm not sure how I'd do the same thing now. If I tried to do
| that now with Fusion, I'd probably have to build out my own
| primitive set of lumber sizes, right?
| kaeland wrote:
| Loved using Google Sketchup back in the day! My high school
| engineering teacher would show off his 3D modeling of cars
| during class. It was so cool seeing what you could do with
| that software!
| urnicus wrote:
| I wonder if there is a reddit thread with people showing off
| their surviving Windows XP setups. Mine is a dell tower laying
| on its side because I harvested a power supply unit from
| another dell, but it doesn't fit in the case.
| andix wrote:
| I've also helped running an old Windows 3.1 accounting
| software. It runs perfectly fine on Windows XP inside a VM.
|
| In 2020 it suddenly came to a halt, because the date pickers
| just couldn't go further than 2019. Nobody seemed to care in
| 1992 when it was released.
|
| It was really easy to de-compile the Visual Basic 3 software
| (perfectly legal where I live). My first idea was to get the
| source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with
| Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some
| 3rd party libraries that I just couldn't get a hold of.
|
| In the end I just changed the number 2019 in the binary to 2059
| in a hex editor, and it just worked. There was only one
| occurrence of the number 2019 in the whole binary. I guess I
| got really lucky.
|
| Edit: It seems like Windows and Visual Basic are not affected
| by the Unix 2038 problem at all. 16 bit Windows seems to be
| fine until the year 2107.
| mschaef wrote:
| > My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and
| compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I
| couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries
| that I just couldn't get a hold of.
|
| This was super common for VB apps. The original architecture
| of VB was, loosely speaking, a GUI container for various
| pluggable controls connected to a BASIC runtime. The number
| of controls that came in the box would vary depending on how
| fancy a version of VB you bought, and you could plug in
| additional third party controls in the form of "VBX's" -
| Visual Basic eXtensions. Even though VBX's were designed
| mainly for GUI controls, they were the easiest extension
| point for VB and got extensively used for all sorts of
| integrations until OLE Automation became more prevalent.
| (Roughly contemporaneous with the switch to 32-bit.)
| FishByte wrote:
| Only a few ago I had been installing new VoIP phones for a small
| business on the East Coast that had 2 or 3 green screen terminals
| and an IBM server running some variant of Unix. Most people in
| the office had terminal emulators, but one fellow in the
| warehouse section showed off his boxed terminals they had on hand
| incase one died. It is interesting to me to hear from someone
| that experienced these anachronistic machines and software. Very
| unique building, there was a floor between floors you could only
| get to via the warehouse. It made for an unnaturally long
| stairwell.
| kid64 wrote:
| There are entire businesses still running on Commodores..
|
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/2562588/this-us-business-sti...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Commodore/comments/avv1j1/this_olda...
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.cbm/c/LuLJihA1NCU?pli=1...
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Somewhere in 2004 I upgraded a TUI interface for a major
| advertising company in Belgium to support EUR. They used it for
| many years since, AFAIK.
| jm4 wrote:
| I don't think you're blinded by nostalgia. In the early 2000's, I
| worked in an organization that was migrating away from TUI to web
| apps. I was one of the web guys back then. We got modern, more
| maintainable code at the expense of usability. Those TUI
| interfaces are way faster.
|
| The web failed to live up to the early promises in a lot of ways.
| We have complicated frameworks, complex architectures, browser
| headaches, etc. and what we got out of it are user interfaces
| that are slower than what we replaced and entire categories of
| bugs that didn't exist before. There's so much extra bullshit in
| place to overcome the fact that we are using a stateless protocol
| designed to deliver text documents.
|
| The only things I would really be concerned about with your
| family company's app are maintainability, availability of
| security updates, and the use of obsolete software like XP. It
| sounds like you're already modernizing the code. That old OS is a
| disaster waiting to happen though.
|
| I like the idea of an internal enterprise app running in the
| terminal on a reliable FreeBSD or Linux machine. The people who
| have to live in that app will be faster with a keyboard-driven
| workflow. A web front end is for customers and situations where
| you prioritize looks and accessibility over speed and usability.
| If you implement the the business rules in a modern middle tier
| and have a good database backing it, you can have the best of
| both - TUI for internal users and slap on a web front end for
| external users.
| kurtoid wrote:
| I'm starting to maintain a COBOL codebase for my dad's small
| business. It uses MicroFocus's runtime so it runs fine on Windows
| 10/11 (but I'm trying to migrate it to OpenCOBOL). He helped
| write a good chunk of it, but doesn't make any major changes to
| it anymore. I'm not confident enough to make major changes to it,
| but I fix some bugs here and there. I ended up writing a python
| script to parse the database layout for a python-based fuzzy
| search tool, but I still stuck to a terminal UI for it.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| This whole thread reminds me of when I saw my first Windows-based
| ticket dispensing machine at a movie theater. Early in the year
| there was a screening of the Star Wars trilogy at the Cinema at
| the North Park Mall in Dallas. Every geek for miles beat a path
| to the theater. When I got there the line was moving along
| reasonably quickly and was maybe 20 people deep. No problem. You
| get to the front of the line, hand over a $10 for two $5 tickets
| and the cashier pressed the "dispense ticket" button twice. Two
| tickets came out immediately and you were on your way.
|
| Later that same year Jurassic Park premiered at the same
| location. Again, every geek for miles around beat a path to the
| theater. But this time when I arrived, the line was hundreds of
| people deep and it took about 45 minutes to get to the head of
| the line (good thing we got there early.) When I got up to the
| cashier I found they had a new Windows-3.1 based ticket
| dispensing system. You said how many tickets you wanted and the
| cashier moved the mouse over a text field, took their hands off
| the mouse to type "1" or "2" or whatever. If you bought a child's
| ticket or a senior ticket, that went in a different form field.
| Then the cashier put their hands back on the mouse, scrolled down
| and hit the "calculate" button. It told them how much cash to
| take. They took their hands off the keyboard to collect the cash
| and then pressed the "dispense tickets" button. Thankfully, the
| system seemed to actually dispense tickets without crashing.
| (Windows 3.x had a very bad reliability reputation.)
|
| What had taken 10-15 seconds with the "old school" interface now
| took about a minute.
|
| Never let anyone tell you "the new system" is better just because
| it is new.
|
| [[ Also, about this time I remembered Jef Raskin going on about
| keyboard interfaces, but this was long before the publication of
| The Humane Interface. And I know we're using the initialism "TUI"
| in this thread to mean "Text UI", but some people use it to mean
| "Tactile UI." No one ever got fired for recommending a React
| Single Page App optimized to quickly swap pages on the current
| model iPhone. Whether or not that's the best interface for the
| application is irrelevant. ]]
| iamnotarobotman wrote:
| Just recently seen this sort of trend of text-based UI or "TUI"
| applications in the terminal which has caught my attention ever
| since Claude Code.
|
| Where can I find these TUI applications to look at?
| 0x01FE wrote:
| https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| There's this Polish article about a company that balance drive
| shafts with commodore c64
|
| https://www.trojmiasto.pl/tv/Commodore-64-maszyna-do-wywazan...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| A fairly large GDS company has replaced their old "green screen"
| terminals with a web app that contains the same green screen but
| with syntax highlighting and hyperlinks inline controls that
| appear and other quality of life improvements.
| dangoor wrote:
| This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the
| green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs
| were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't
| replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it
| to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the
| system that need it.
|
| I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for
| many tasks, but I do wonder about touch screens. For some
| things, touch screens can be plenty fast and the UI adapts to
| the task.
| bnug wrote:
| Yeah, I was just thinking of a very popular bar that I would
| go to about 15 years ago that was operated on very simple
| touch screens with large UI buttons. The bartenders could
| enter drinks & the tab it goes on very fast. It wasn't
| flashy, but very simple large buttons that always pop up in
| the same place very quickly, so they definitely had some
| muscle-memory going on for navigating it.
| bri3d wrote:
| I worked with a steel warehouse about 10 years ago who were using
| software written in a Data General Business BASIC offshoot
| dialect, which ran on a proprietary Windows runtime that was
| essentially emulating the original minicomputer which ran the
| software when it was originally written in the late 1970s.
| Thankfully, the emulator at least ran on Windows so we were able
| to move it to a hosted environment with backups and away from a
| random tower in a metal warehouse, which is no place for a
| computer.
|
| We were also tasked with adding new process automation and
| tooling. Instead of rewriting the system, we reverse engineered
| the database format and wrote additional tools and utilities
| around the core tooling, using more modern frameworks. I think
| this was the right choice and everyone was happy: they didn't
| have to relearn years of muscle-memory and business process built
| around the BASIC system, but we could iterate in a modern
| programming environment.
|
| It wouldn't be surprising if the system was still in use, there
| was nothing wrong with it and it worked great.
| gruntledfangler wrote:
| I've worked at many bars and restaurants. The best ordering
| interface I ever used was at Pizza Hut circa 1999. It was a
| monochrome TUI (orange). It was ancient-looking even then.
|
| The speed was incredible once you got proficient. Once you got
| the muscle memory down you could punch in any single pizza order
| in less than a second. Even something complicated like different
| toppings on the halves was NBD. Pizza Hut was always coming up
| with these ridiculous gimmicks and the system could accommodate
| them seamlessly. Just incredible.
|
| This system probably quietly saved the company millions in its
| time.
| pplante wrote:
| I watched Alien: Earth recently and was admiring the TUIs
| everywhere. The show takes place in 2120 and they kept up the
| aesthetics of the original movies. A future full of synthetic
| humanoids and interstellar ships kept the TUI. I do not remember
| tablets being in the series, however even those seem to use a
| similar TUI.
|
| I look forward to my great grandchildren rediscovering the TUI.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| When I worked at State Street everything was done in IBM/370
| terminal emulators and a COM component which made is easy to
| scrape information into Excel. I wasn't really supposed to know
| about that but found enough code examples which weren't password
| protected that I could figure it out.
| LTL_FTC wrote:
| I worked as a sales consultant for AT&T wireless, back during the
| smartphone boom, at their retail stores. During onboarding
| everyone was taught how to use the GUI for everything (OPUS, I
| believe it was called): creating accounts, upgrading accounts,
| etc. But I noticed a few of the senior reps lived in the TUI
| (Telegence) and wondered why. When asked they claimed they were
| just used to it, but I quickly learned how much faster it was by
| observing them. They were able to process customers so much more
| quickly, a comparative advantage in commissioned-based sales.
|
| My buddy and I requested access and learned how to use it. Not
| only did it streamline our process, it allowed us to do
| everything, where the GUI often omitted certain tasks forcing us
| reps to call customer service (for example, providing customers
| with credits after fixing their accounts).
|
| So we lived with both the GUI up for when management walked by
| and relied on the TUI when we needed/wanted to work quickly.
|
| I bet the system hasn't changed a bit. But I still live in the
| terminal quite a bit these days.
| dkenyser wrote:
| I immediately think of Terminal Coffee[1].
|
| Been experimenting with charmbracelet's[2] stuff recently to do
| something similar. Still very early stages so nothing to show off
| yet but would highly recommend it for anyone else looking into
| creating a TUI app/business.
|
| [1] https://www.terminal.shop/ [2]
| https://github.com/charmbracelet
| ghthor wrote:
| I'm bringing charmbracelet to the web using gotty. The example
| is chat app that uses tailscale as the auth layer, and is
| exposed over ssh via charmbracelet/wish and over http via
| gotty. I haven't written any docs yet; you should be able to
| run the example chat app on your tail net.
|
| Would like to add some other forms of auth, but tailscale was
| just so easy to provide the same auth for both ssh & http.
|
| https://github.com/ghthor/webtea
| H1Supreme wrote:
| I think those old TUI systems are analogous to learning Vim. At
| first, you don't wtf is going on. But, the more time you spend
| with it, the more it's ingrained, and eventually becomes second
| nature.
|
| I've seen many of these systems over the years. Before I moved
| into software full time, the company I was working for was
| transitioning from a TUI to a GUI based system. The long time
| sales and warehousing staff absolutely hated it. Which, yes, is
| par for the course with any new system. But, I really believe
| there is an (potential) efficiency to a TUI system that makes it
| superior to a GUI when dealing with prototypical business
| operations (order entry, inventory lookup, etc).
|
| Which makes me think, is there a market for "modern" TUI systems?
| orochimaaru wrote:
| Costco runs on TUI. They force you into minimal design and
| uncomplicated workflows. I bet someone is going to say you need
| servicenow to manage all this in an easier way. Please don't
| listen to that person
| oojuliuso wrote:
| Love walking by the AS/400 terminal emulator screens after
| checkout. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
| orochimaaru wrote:
| You may need to get it to a shape where you can hire people
| to maintain it and not rely on IBM all the time ;)
|
| But that being said I love TUI. Don't ever need to use a
| mouse - Muscle memory and speed. Moving away from as/400
| should not mean giving up the TUI
| Gracana wrote:
| My employer was running Growthpower (ERP software) on an HP 3000
| system up until 2018 or so. We replaced it with a "modern"
| .NET/MSSQL ERP solution that does a lot more, but it's slow and
| terrible to navigate compared to the old console menu system, and
| its database is hundreds of tables without a single foreign key.
| The frontend application makes a long series of sequential
| queries to build each view... if you're willing to wade through
| the muck, you can write a server side query that can do in
| milliseconds what it does in minutes.
| achristmascarl wrote:
| The https://ratatui.rs/ TUI framework has a backend called
| Ratzilla (https://github.com/orhun/ratzilla) that lets you build
| web applications which look and feel like TUIs.
| bombcar wrote:
| Fry's Electronics used to have a powerful TUI for getting parts
| from the cage, the employees could hammer everything in and hit
| print and turn around to do something else while the screens were
| still loading.
|
| Later they had some GUI that was used to open ... a terminal of
| some sort for the same TUI. The GUI made it slower, somehow.
| whalesalad wrote:
| RIP Fry's
| fsckboy wrote:
| the accountant who does my taxes, I don't know what software she
| uses, but just 3 or 4 years ago she sent me a document her
| computer created that had some serious font display problems.
| investigating what I had to do to make it right, I discovered
| that I had to install fonts from Windows 3.1!
| JCharante wrote:
| Have you ever been to a Marriott? They have something called
| MARSHA depending on the property. Once you log in it's basically
| a command line interface filled with abbreviations. As a high
| schooler in 2016 I used to train people at a reservations call
| center on how to use Marsha. It's super unintuitive but
| surprisingly everyone can wrap their heads around it eventually.
| Ok maybe 9 out of 10. You could decline to learn Marsha and work
| for properties that use a GUI like Opera PMS (for us it was
| mainly IHG properties). You got a pay raise if you learned
| Marsha. Opera was great, they later started upgrading to some
| bloated crap with lots of padding between buttons.
|
| IIRC Marsha has transactions so you can build up a reservation
| and make queries in the process. There's even test properties in
| production so you can practice making/reserving/retrieving
| reservations.
| deanebarker wrote:
| I visited a food service company a couple years ago. They had
| phone reps taking orders from customers (restaurants ordering
| produce and such). They used a TUI (a "green screen"
| essentially).
|
| I have never seen people move through a GUI that fast. They were
| lightning quick with it. They were like an veteran accountant
| with a ten-key adding machine. It was amazing, and pretty damn
| sobering when you think how much work we spend on GUIs.
| layer8 wrote:
| > I can fly around in it.
|
| That's what's so efficient about TUIs for local software. You
| typically can't do that in web apps. Not that it's impossible,
| but it's far from the default.
| kbr2000 wrote:
| Seems like a good fit for Expect.
|
| https://core.tcl-lang.org/expect/index
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect
| deadbabe wrote:
| Any good guides to building TUIs in 2025?
| 0xCE0 wrote:
| IBM IMS - fast until abend :)
| ProfessorZoom wrote:
| what if your entire business was on a TUI? terminal.shop be like
| samuelknight wrote:
| Microcenter does this too. When you are in the checkout you can
| see the cashier using a DOS interface to ring up the items.
| rlucia wrote:
| Ah I am still running such a thing: a wonderful piece of software
| I wrote in the 90s w/ FoxBase.
|
| But here's the nice thing: I converted everything in a Flask app
| with React frontend.
|
| The nicest thing is that besides using a modern relational DB, I
| write everything to keep old db files synced so that I can still
| run the old app in DosBox...and keep the new stuff in Docker.
|
| It works, flawlessly:-)
| anthk wrote:
| TCL and Expect would shine there. Even JimTCL could do it once
| built against WIndows XP with Min-C:
|
| https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl
|
| https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html
| dwd wrote:
| Worked for a car insurance firm about a decade ago and the whole
| business ran on their Big Iron. I joined the company to work on a
| customer facing web UI that hooked into an API layer the server
| group developed to pull data from the Db2.
|
| The callcentre however still used the TUI for all customer
| inquiries; it was only the customers who got a pretty interface
| to view their details.
|
| Depending on which system you were logged into, you had a green
| screen (production) or magenta (development).
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