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

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.

I supported a lumberyard that was like this too. Also, some "modern" laser machines required ancient versions of Windows and required floppy discs. This was about 20 years ago, though.

I wrote the main application for my wife's business — she's a psychologist. That was only a few years ago, but as a senior lecturer in the more theoretical parts of computer science, I never really needed fancy UIs with flashy graphical effects. So I built a core engine and used the classic dialog tool as the thin user-facing layer.

At first, my wife was pretty disappointed — as a computer science teacher, wasn't I supposed to know how to build a “real” app? But a few years later, she doesn't want anything else. I even offered to have one of my students create a nicer UI without changing the engine or database, but by now she's completely used to the terminal menus.

The tool keeps a database, collects data through dialog forms, generates PDF invoices with groff, and launches Thunderbird when needed (to send invoices, etc.).

Wegmans’ cash registers still use a TUI. It looks quite clean and friendly compared to the GUI-heavy slop of, say, my time at a major retailer. Speaking of nostalgia, my old gaming store also used a TUI for transactions, and it was highly responsive for anything local (and a PITA anytime it had to communicate with the CO). Also been exposed to a number of businesses these past few years who still use old AIX/Unix/TUI boxes for critical business functions, and most seem happy with them.

And therein lies the rub: if the process works, and modern software doesn’t necessarily offer any better value proposition, then there’s no real reason to migrate. For a lot of companies, the status quo might literally be all they’ll ever need, and IT’s role is to just keep it up, available, and secure as times change. Sure, I’ll side-eye a theater using a Windows box as an intermediary for Ticketmaster to run transactions against their old AIX rig collecting dust in a corner of a closet, but if it works and it’s secure, well, more power to them keeping costs down.

The advice I’d give is not to knock something just because it doesn’t fit current narratives around technology. Our jobs - first and foremost - are to build and support solutions that amplify productivity of humans in a way they can use without external support; whether it’s an ancient TUI or a modern GUI isn’t as relevant as its efficacy.

> It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick

Wikipedia vandals these days...