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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?

#201

Post by perlgeek »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #122
perlgeek wrote: post #36

Yes, we still have a TUI to our core CMDB and billing. With 500+ employees, not everybody is happy with it, so we also built an API and a web app to access and manipulate the most central data. But, we also have some power users who absolutely swear by it, and we offer some power user features for them :-) * full readline integration, so there's a command history, Ctrl-R reverse search in the command history etc. * t…

I think you are about a decade off on your first git commit, unless you meant they went cvs -> svn or something and then ended up on git later.

There might have been another VCS involved in between, dunno if it was SVN.

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

#202

Post by bitwize »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #189
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

I definitely see cash register/POS systems like this out in the wild, replete with ugly fonts, Windows 3.x style buttons, and even F-key legends at the bottom. So somebody somewhere is thinking of the poor cashiers.

The entire GUI was sold on it being easy to use for beginners. There's a reason why keybindings are today called "shortcuts": Steve Jobs's diktat was that the primary means of giving commands to the Mac was the mouse. Anything you can do on a Mac (except for entering text) was to be done with, and designed around, the mouse. Keyboard "shortcuts", so called as a quicker way to issue (some, but not all) menu commands, were a sop to power users but really were an addition, not essential to use of the program.

Windows, by contrast, was designed to be keyboard-accessible. Not all PCs in 1985 had mice...

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

#203

Post by orochimaaru »

oojuliuso wrote: post #166
orochimaaru wrote: post #159

Costco runs on TUI. They force you into minimal design and uncomplicated workflows. I bet someone is going to say you need servicenow to manage all this in an easier way. Please don’t listen to that person

Love walking by the AS/400 terminal emulator screens after checkout. If it ain't broke, why fix it?

You may need to get it to a shape where you can hire people to maintain it and not rely on IBM all the time ;)

But that being said I love TUI. Don’t ever need to use a mouse - Muscle memory and speed. Moving away from as/400 should not mean giving up the TUI

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

#204

Post by cactusplant7374 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #189
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

> while near zero thought is being put on users having to use given piece of software for hours at end, day in, day out

And those users want more batch creation and editing.

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

#205

Post by Scoundreller »

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…

> It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons.

Oh, I’ve been a new hire at places like this.

The day1 stuff in the system will be logically or coherently placed (e.g. alphabetically) and then the rest will be incrementally added on top.

The menu options will go like this:

1. Alpha

2. Bravo

3. Charlie

4. Turbo-Bravo

5. Charlie-Undo

6. AAAlpha

Great for day1 users that are still there and started with just 3 options but new users are screwed. The arrangement started to stop making sense circa 1995.

I’ve seen the same thing where parts shelves were sorted by manufacturer (to make re-ordering by manufacturer simple).

When they moved to automatic inventory, shelves didn’t matter anymore and if a part was made by manu1 but now manu2, they’d keep putting it with manu1 because “that’s where everyone’s gone to look for it for the part 20 years”.

All you had to know was who made that part in 2003 when auto-inventory stopped forcing them to be consistent by manufacturer to know which shelf to pick from. Easy!

New hires get screwed and over time nothing makes sense anymore.

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

#206

Post by bigstrat2003 »

ilaksh wrote: post #140
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…

> 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.

Indeed. Most developers today make their own easiness of development the priority, not anything related to the end user's experience. This is why software is so bloated and slow, but the pernicious idea of "developer experience matters more than speed" doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

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

#207

Post by iso1631 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #120
thesuitonym wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will say that these systems take time and effort to learn. You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't too hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have to memorize a lot of product metadata. One thing that often gets lost in the discussion of TUIs vs GUIs is that this is also true of GUIs. You have to know which icon to click, and it's not always in the same place, and not always label…

The cool thing about TUIs is that everything has an explicit label because it has to be this way. On the system I use, every menu item was prefixed with a number. You punch in that number on the keyboard and you're in that menu. Just absolutely beautiful functionality

GUIs used to have this too of course. Alt-F to bring up the file menu, the hotkey was underlined.

That seems to have slowly vanished over the last 30 years

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

#208

Post by IshKebab »

sverhagen wrote: post #42
IshKebab wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a completely unironic obituary linked from the LA Times from 1994, which makes me wonder if the scandalous meaning even existed yet in those days?

Well it started with smartphones, so no.

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

#209

Post by nivethan »

trbleclef wrote: post #34
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

My dad recently retired but his company was still using Pick as of a year or two ago. They also had a one-dude maintenance plan. I wonder if it was the same dude.

So many of these systems were one man shops. It really speaks to how easy to develop pick systems was. It still very much is.

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

#210

Post by mrweasel »

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…

You see this a lot with videos editors. A professional video editor flies around in their software of choice like an sales person in a TUI. Both are inherently proficient with their tool, to the extend that it's hard to graps what's actually happening on screen. We also see this with editors and IDE. Some people cruise around Emacs or Vim, while other hit a few keys and Visual Studio or IntelliJ will refactor 500 lines of code in an instant.

The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can navigate and input faster than the program can render. So you vaguely see a screen change, a menu move or an overlay pop up, only to instantly disappear. The user doesn't need to know what's happening on screen, because they trust their fingers and the system to do the right thing.

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