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Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

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Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#221

Post by electroly »

graemep wrote: post #162
beachy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the old days, the primary users of many mainframe UIs were the data entry team (almost universally female). Sitting in large offices with rows of desks and a huge clock on the front wall, they weren't interacting with customers, they were transcribing from sales sheets, order forms, application forms, etc. prepared by someone else. There was no great need for user friendliness, because the only users were in…

Mice are the problem, not the rest of the GUI. Keyboards are just faster once you learn them.

It's part of it but not all of it. Today's modern UIs won't buffer keystrokes as you move between UI contexts. You often have to wait for a bit of UI to load/appear before you can continue, or else your premature keystroke will be eaten or apply to the wrong window. This kills your throughput because you have to look at the screen and wait to recognize something happening. Even if you have all the keystrokes memorized, the UI still makes you wait.

In a traditional TUI you can type at full speed and the system will process the keystrokes as it is able, with no keystrokes being lost. If a keystroke calls up a new screen, then the very next keystroke will apply to that screen. Competent users could be several screens ahead of the computer, because the system doesn't make them wait for the UI to appear before accepting the keystrokes that will apply to that UI.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#223

Post by bitwize »

morsch wrote: post #98
bitwize wrote: post #71

I've been faffing about with mainframe stuff lately using Hercules. So I'm going to nominate ISPF on mainframes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISPF Because the IBM mainframe world was late to the time-sharing party (ISPF was based on TSO, the Time-Sharing Option for System/360 and System/370, because the default mode for mainframes was batch processing from punched cards), and because IBM's 3270 terminal used screen-…

Not sure how related it is, but I found this series on the AS/400 fascinating: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9tkJGALYJ6CzZSPwM-09E5tk...

The AS/400 (aka IBM i) appears to be of a different lineage, derived from the late-70s IBM System/38 minicomputers.

Nevertheless, it sports many IBM-isms in its design, including integrating database functionality directly into the operating system, making database tables and files almost coterminous with record-level file access being the primary mode of access; and the use of block-oriented, rather than character-oriented terminals (the IBM 5250).

Interestingly unique to IBM i among IBM operating systems is the pervasive use of object orientation throughout its system APIs; there are no pointers, everything is an object over which some operations are permitted and others forbidden. While the mainframe series retained darn-near-perfect backwards compatibility through system-level emulation of old architectures on top of new architectures, IBM i's solution to this problem is different: TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface), a kernel-level abstract machine to which all IBM i applications are targeted. No programmer access to the underlying machine code is provided. Rather, the first time the kernel loads a TIMI executable, it AOT-compiles it to whatever the underlying CPU architecture it is. This enables seamless CPU architecture changes with perfect backwards compatibility for application code; this already happened in the 90s as the AS/400 line migrated from a System/38-based architecture to PowerPC.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#226

Post by mixmastamyk »

stuaxo wrote: post #75
solardev wrote: post #6

In stark contrast to most GNU/*nix tools, I really liked MS-DOS's edit.com text editor. Unlike emacs or vim or even nano, it didn't have a bunch of invisible shortcut keys, just a Windows-like drop-down menu system (but rendered in DOS). You could easily browse through the menu hierarchy, but still memorize certain shortcuts that you often use (just like Windows). In later versions you could even use the mouse to sel…

I'm also a fan of the TUI from Qbasic, it also appeared in Microsoft Works for DOS, Microsoft Word for DOS and probably other places. The UI was refered to as COW character oriented windows. It would be good if it could be open sourced, for historical reference. There were other interesting TUIs, the one in Defrag in DOS, and the Antivirus would change characters on the fly to generate a mouse cursor. The TUI in DOSS…

Happily Yedit is supposed to make its debut in Windows in the near future. At least according to a thread at github.

Someone linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40293624

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#227

Post by mixmastamyk »

zozbot234 wrote: post #83
jmclnx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, I found it much easier to create TUIs on DOS than on a UN*X system. I still have a hard time with curses. Zortech c on DOS had a small set of screen functions, disp_*(). These are enhanced printf(), scanf(), getc() type functions by adding cursor positioning on an 80x25 screen. Pretty basic but you could create nice applications with these basic functions in Zortech c. Granted, on DOS the screen size d…

MS-DOS also supported the 80x43 or 80x50 screen modes for extra information density. On later hardware you would have SVGA-based or VESA-based text modes with even more density, though by that time DOS itself had mostly fallen out of use.

I seem to remember one 132 wide, but since the resolution didn’t change (much?) it was near unreadable.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#228

Post by aitchnyu »

kjellsbells wrote: post #115

If you are in the US, pick a slow day and chat to the customer service people at Lowes or Costco. Both stores use TUI interfaces for their instore service apps, and boy are they fast with them. They reserve GUI things for the self service point of sale systems and keep the TUI for cases where speed matters. I suspect that these apps might once have been mainframe hosted (in other words, screen-oriented, with the PC t…

I'm 35 and DOS applications in Windows machines were a common sight in India. They gave way to GUIs that can cram so much data in a 1024*768 black and white screen that I hate most webapps running on my 5k perfect color accuracy screen and can be quickly navigated by a loud mechanical keyboard.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#229

Post by Modified3019 »

In an old warehouse/fabrication job I had back in the late 2000s, I used some TUI based inventory/work order management system on a Windows NT computer isolated from the internet. The singular software it ran was called QIS-II… I think, I’m not clear any more.

It looked like your typical 16 color monospaced DOS TUI and was definitely intuitive to start with, but for the set of things I had to do, it was fast and fluid to use once one developed fluency with it’s layout and controls. I actually kind of miss it.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#230

Post by gattilorenz »

tetraca wrote: post #18

QuickBASIC or even Visual Basic 1 immediately come to mind. They have good, discoverable navigation and documentation. I have no idea where you'd be able to find it since it's a proprietary product but InfoLease 9 had one of my favorites TUIs from a long gone era. You could navigate through and edit complicated contract information extremely quickly through a series of fixed number based menus and views. Once I got t…

Visual Basic for DOS is AWESOME. I briefly used it last year to make a Wordle clone for Dos.

The 3D buttons in a TUI, event-based programming in DOS, the rich help system… just awesome.

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