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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?

#171

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #121
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.

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.

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

#172

Post by bnug »

1313ed01 wrote: post #163
CalRobert wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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-pre…

Oh yeah - AutoCAD by Autodesk was also like this. Once you memorized the keystrokes, you could fly through your line drawing.

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

#173

Post by 1313ed01 »

conductr wrote: post #58
bdavisx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#174

Post by kotaKat »

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…

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.

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

#175

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #121
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.

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.

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

#176

Post by andix »

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…

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.

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

#177

Post by tarsinge »

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…

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.

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

#178

Post by patmcc »

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…

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.

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

#179

Post by fsckboy »

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!

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

#180

Post by kotaKat »

andix wrote: post #151
dardeaup wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 tex…

> 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.

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