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.
Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
111–120 of 315 posts
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> nobody will implement it that way This is not true. Smart companies do it exactly that way. It saves them a lot of money.
I've never seen a smart company then.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> nobody will implement it that way This is not true. Smart companies do it exactly that way. It saves them a lot of money.
I have a hard time believing this. The medium impacts interaction.
Do you have concrete examples in mind that we can review?
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#114This 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. ]]
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#115I 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…
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".
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#116Just 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?
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ex…
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).
> 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).
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
> 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.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#119I 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.
Was it Dynix by chance?
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#120Many (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 it…
> 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 label…
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