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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?

#261

Post by Jotalea »

I work in a medical center, which is my family business. in here, I am the IT guy, as well as receptionist and one of the secretaries.

we currently use a 2019 HP Pavilion 15 laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U, 12GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 512GB SSD. as you may have noticed, this computer is insanely overpowered for just using Excel and WhatsApp. that's why I've been given the task to downgrade to a different piece of hardware, a 2011 laptop with an Intel Pentium P6200, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 300GB HDD.

and I am the guy responsible of building the old-new TUI app we will use in that machine. I am conscious of how much of a downgrade this is, but it's to avoid throwing away hardware that still works.

I have made a few prototypes using lightweight web technologies, but I ended up not liking how they look, perform or interact, so I start over. this time I will attempt to build something especially tailored to this old laptop, using TUI tools like ncurses.

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

#262

Post by dchuk »

A lot of “traditional” industries still run on TUIs/even as400 systems, such as freight/trucking companies, banking, medical, travel (saber, etc). And many companies in those spaces who appear to have migrated away from those systems are likely just using a modern gui interface that still uses those old systems behind the scenes.

It’s generally because 1) they’re actually reliable 2) they contain custom business logic and rules that are not documented well/at all and hard to replicate 3) the people who set up all of these things have retired and no one is left who understands any of it

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

#263

Post by CalRobert »

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?

My memory is hazy but the heydey of underlined shortcuts was in the era when not everyone used a mouse, if I remember right - support was strong in e.g Windows 3.1 (dating myself a bit here) and got worse from Windows 95 onwards...

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

#264

Post by jazzyjackson »

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…

Are you taking on new customers? I know a few folks hungry for old fashioned, on premises accounting and task tracking now that Intuit is pushing everyone to cloud subscriptions.

Ideally it would be a perpetual license so we can never have the rug pulled on business critical data, but I like the "x years of updates and support" model

You can contact me at my username + gmail if you wouldn't mind discussing further

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

#265

Post by toast0 »

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…

> Once you learn that you can pop into a quick order menu with this specific sequence of five keys, you just automatically open the right menu the moment a customer walks up. No thought, just pure reflex.

This works because you can 'buffer inputs' as the gaming crowd says. You can hit the keys and the computer reads them one at a time and does what you asked at its pace. Often these kinds of systems do run faster than the input, but when they don't, it still works.

It's hard to do that with a GUI, you usually can't click (or tap) the button before it shows up and expect it to work... and when it does work like that, it's often undesirable.

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

#268

Post by anthk »

fluoridation wrote: post #257
anthk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an issue with modern terminals and Unifont.

You are underestimating the complexity of laying out multilingual text.

Enough to read Japanese under Unicode. Arabic might be more difficult but a native might read it in a hurry at least.

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

#270

Post by gadders »

arichard123 wrote: post #14

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You…

I remember seeing how past people were in 1-2-3 for DOS using the / menu back in the 90's.
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