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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?

#251

Post by bitwize »

mrweasel wrote: post #210
egypturnash wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lin…

Movie editors are as persnickety about their editing software as we are about ours, it turns out, for many of the same reasons: we accumulate years of proficiency with a tool and don't want to have to retrain in something else without a clear head-and-shoulders advantage.

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

#252

Post by dwd »

Worked for a car insurance firm about a decade ago and the whole business ran on their Big Iron. I joined the company to work on a customer facing web UI that hooked into an API layer the server group developed to pull data from the Db2.

The callcentre however still used the TUI for all customer inquiries; it was only the customers who got a pretty interface to view their details.

Depending on which system you were logged into, you had a green screen (production) or magenta (development).

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

#254

Post by ineedasername »

Prediction: there will be a huge demand for apps that have at least a baseline of functionality that is TUI enabled, preferably feature complete.

Why? Token in & out inference cost. Heck of a lot cheaper to use an LLM than a vision model for something like automating apps, or enabling your app to be agent-friendly at a low cost.

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

#255

Post by ddingus »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #169
CalRobert wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We solved this with mnemonics (underlined letter is the shortcut) but then got rid of them for some reason

I recently rediscovered that I can do GUI menu things on the keyboard in apps like VLC. Feels like a magic trick -- the best of both worlds. Was it the move to phones that did it? Or did most people not use alt shortcuts?

Some keyboard apps will input those shortcut combos. Many work on phones. I found out when using a Bluetooth keyboard one day for some emergency doxument create when I got stuck with both a deadline and a dead laptop.

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

#256

Post by gwking »

My first programming "job" was a sort of summer internship when I was 14 for a family owned company called Signature Systems (signature.net). They are still in business. Their product is an operating system called Comet, that if I'm not mistaken was originally a compatibility play bringing software from the previous era of 16 bit microcomputers onto DOS PCs, and then later into Windows. I may be misremembering some of the details but I think at one point a Comet system ran ticket sales at Madison Square Gardens. My summer project was to build a demo using their new support for Windows GUI elements. The last time I spoke with the owners, they told me that they still had customers, including in the textiles industry where loom patterns had been coded in Basic. I often think about it as an example of a legacy system, and smile at the idea of someone thinking they need to rewrite their plaid weave in TypeScript or Rust.

Separately, I have spent the last three years building a web app that replaced a heap of automation scripts for a ~50 person business. These were much more modern than what the OP describes but it had some of the same qualities. The scripts mostly generated google sheets and emails. The replacement is a python web app using SQLite. Moving the company data into a proper database has been a very significant step for them. In some ways, the project feels a lot like custom business software that got built in the 90s.

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

#257

Post by fluoridation »

anthk wrote: post #249
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.

Not an issue with modern terminals and Unifont.

You are underestimating the complexity of laying out multilingual text.

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

#258

Post by _pob »

My grandfather purchased a niche customer management DOS application in 1986 or so and used that Software up until the day he died in 2012.

When he was finally forced to upgrade to a computer without a parallel port, he was a bit stuck for a bit because the software would only print to a printer connected via parallel port. I couldn’t find a card for this at the time, for whatever reason, but I eventually was able to trick the software into printing to a modern printer and I had never seen him more happy since it saved him the $3000 software upgrade fee.

Miss you, Grandpa!

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

#259

Post by array_key_first »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #121
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…

This is about keyboard navigation rather than TUI vs GUI, there is no reason you have to render your app with plain text to support efficient keyboard nav.

It's also about consumer software versus business software.

Consumer software is all about conning people who don't currently own the software into thinking it's good and buying it. Once they have it, their experience doesn't matter at all. In fact, you should actively make the software less capable - really dumb it down, to appeal to the widest audience. Yes, more white space, yes, more menus. An error message that says 'oopsy something went wrong'? What a splendid idea! Information density does not matter. Speed does not matter. Accuracy of data does not matter. Hell, even bugs don't matter, if your software looks pretty.

Business software is different. It's crufty, it's ugly, and it doesn't change. Because you're optimizing for your users using the same software for 8 hours a day for the rest of their lives.

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

#260

Post by myth2018 »

iveqy wrote: post #32

I built my own ERP system for handling my business. It's also an TUI and has been here on Hacker News a few times. About training new staff, there's actually studies done on it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2655855/ My 2 cents is that GUI is good for exploring new software, while TUI is wonderful if you already have a mental map of what you're doing. So for everyday used software I would definitely hope t…

What a coincidence, I've just read this paper while I prepare my proposal for a PhD. I feel that the difficulties reported by the novice users were related to the peculiarities of the mainframe interfaces + the 3270 emulator. Not exactly to the fact that they were using a TUI.
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