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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?

#191

Post by fluoridation »

wpm wrote: post #183
fluoridation wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Yes, you can spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to lay out multilingual text on a terminal, or just use Cairo or some toolkit and let solved problems stay solved.

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

#192

Post by mschaef »

andix wrote: post #176
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 compil…

> 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.

This was super common for VB apps. The original architecture of VB was, loosely speaking, a GUI container for various pluggable controls connected to a BASIC runtime. The number of controls that came in the box would vary depending on how fancy a version of VB you bought, and you could plug in additional third party controls in the form of "VBX's" - Visual Basic eXtensions. Even though VBX's were designed mainly for GUI controls, they were the easiest extension point for VB and got extensively used for all sorts of integrations until OLE Automation became more prevalent. (Roughly contemporaneous with the switch to 32-bit.)

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

#193

Post by xmcp123 »

IshKebab wrote: post #29
berbec wrote: post #22

A client i work for used a Pick system and it's maintained by one dude. He's in his 60s, so who knows how long they'll be able to get support... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

> It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick Wikipedia vandals these days...

Dick Pick, initially released on GIRLS.

Wow

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

#194

Post by deanebarker »

I visited a food service company a couple years ago. They had phone reps taking orders from customers (restaurants ordering produce and such). They used a TUI (a "green screen" essentially).

I have never seen people move through a GUI that fast. They were lightning quick with it. They were like an veteran accountant with a ten-key adding machine. It was amazing, and pretty damn sobering when you think how much work we spend on GUIs.

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

#195

Post by sarchertech »

miki123211 wrote: post #186
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.

Attrition is higher overall for sure, but retail stores always had high turnover—temporary workers, seasonal workers, high school kids etc…

If you’ve seen any of the GUI retail tools that replaced the TUIs, they certainly aren’t designed for discoverability.

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

#196

Post by nivethan »

berbec wrote: post #22

A client i work for used a Pick system and it's maintained by one dude. He's in his 60s, so who knows how long they'll be able to get support... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

I work on a bunch of Pick systems :) Love it all and we're still doing active development. (Feel free to send me an e-mail, we pick up orphaned systems)

If anyone wants to take a look, here are some links:

Open source version: https://github.com/geneb/ScarletDME

The last version of true pick: https://github.com/Krowemoh/R83

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

#197

Post by palmotea »

radley wrote: post #181
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 app…

> > 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.

I used Mac OS during that era. While in many ways it was better than the GUIs we have now, using the mouse was an absolute must, which prevented it from ever getting as efficient as a TUI. Yes there were keyboard shortcuts, but they were never sufficient to use the machine or any application without a mouse. Also they had to be completely memorized to be useful.

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

#198

Post by palmotea »

miki123211 wrote: post #186
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.

> Times have changed. Priorities have changed.

I think what actually happened was technology changed. GUIs became possible, and therefore most designers made GUIs without much if any thought (because many assume newer == better). Now you'd be hard pressed to even build a TUI, since most know only how to build GUIs and all the tools are GUI focused.

> 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.

That sounds like a post-hoc justification. Also higher attrition doesn't just happen like the weather. Deliberate decisions lead to it.

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

#199

Post by bnug »

dangoor wrote: post #168
nsxwolf wrote: post #133

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.

This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the system that need it. I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for many tasks, but I do wonder abou…

Yeah, I was just thinking of a very popular bar that I would go to about 15 years ago that was operated on very simple touch screens with large UI buttons. The bartenders could enter drinks & the tab it goes on very fast. It wasn't flashy, but very simple large buttons that always pop up in the same place very quickly, so they definitely had some muscle-memory going on for navigating it.
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