Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 315 posts

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

#131

Post by burningChrome »

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…

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.

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

#132

Post by cogman10 »

mrngm wrote: post #61

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…

I think the Bloomberg terminal counts as a TUI. It's also probably the most complex and heavily used TUI in existence.

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

#133

Post by nsxwolf »

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.

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

#134

Post by H1Supreme »

CrimsonCape wrote: post #73
theragra wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you consider waste? Living in a small town? Working for a utility company? Working with outdated software?

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.

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

#135

Post by cogman10 »

privong wrote: post #59

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…

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.

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

#136

Post by 0x01FE »

iamnotarobotman wrote: post #116

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?

https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

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

#137

Post by bri3d »

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.

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

#138

Post by mbreese »

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.

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?

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

#139

Post by CalRobert »

egypturnash wrote: post #102
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…

> 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…

We solved this with mnemonics (underlined letter is the shortcut) but then got rid of them for some reason

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

#140

Post by ilaksh »

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…

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
Post reply on HN