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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?

#181

Post by radley »

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…

> 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.

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

#182

Post by JCharante »

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.

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

#183

Post by wpm »

fluoridation wrote: post #90
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…

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.

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.

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

#184

Post by andix »

H1Supreme wrote: post #127
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.

PHP used to have dBase database support. Also older version of Excel can just open dBase. LibreOffice seems to support it too.

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

#185

Post by amatecha »

cogman10 wrote: post #135
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.

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.

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

#186

Post by miki123211 »

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…

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.

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

#187

Post by Rizz »

fluoridation wrote: post #98
dardeaup wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O? It's still just ASCII characters.

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.

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

#188

Post by whalesalad »

LocalH wrote: post #119
whalesalad wrote: post #64

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.

Was it Dynix by chance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_%28software%29

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

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

#189

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

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

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

#190

Post by supportengineer »

BryanA wrote: post #125
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…

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.

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