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Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

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Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#121

Post by wilsonnb3 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #20

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 it…

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.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#122

Post by wilsonnb3 »

perlgeek wrote: post #36

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. * t…

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.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#123

Post by sorenjan »

OJFord wrote: post #99
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #94

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…

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.

All three were bought by Google, they didn't start there.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#124

Post by DavidPeiffer »

vablings wrote: post #8
mitchell_h wrote: post #4

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.

Also, Costco uses AS/400. Applications that are pure function over form are amazing

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.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#125

Post by BryanA »

arichard123 wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#126

Post by andix »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #113
andix wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The things I've worked on were custom tools for internal use. Built on top of existing systems, to improve productivity for specific workflows.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#127

Post by H1Supreme »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #74

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 thi…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#128

Post by andix »

hgamaral wrote: post #117
andix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#129

Post by dardeaup »

andix wrote: post #38

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 Window…

What type of business was it? What kind of functionality did this TUI application provide?
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