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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?

#271

Post by rjmunro »

radley wrote: post #181
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…

> UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago. I'm going to push back a little on that. For several years, MacOS followed a strong UX convention with consistent keyboard shortcuts, menus, layout order, and more. Similarly, Microsoft started with the same, but with everything reversed. At the time, most major cross-platform apps followed these conventions. Two periods broke these rules: the expansion of web app…

I think Microsoft Office 2007 moving to a "ribbon" rather than normal menus and an optional toolbar for certain things was the major break in usability. Mac OS has kept the menus, and added a really useful menu search thing in "help", and this is huge.

I think sublime text was one of the first to bring the TUI style super-powers into the modern desktop UK, where you press some random keyboard shortcut (e.g. cmd-p in sublime) and you can instantly start typing a command.

Another thought I have had for a long time is that when GUIs like Mac and Windows were taking off, they were often described as more "user friendly" than TUIs. I always thought this depended on the kind of user. A lot of effort went into prioritising making it possible for an untrained user to use a system, but making it fast for someone with experience was no longer important.

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

#272

Post by mrighele »

Not 100% related, but there are a few of business around that still use home computers from the 80's.

some examples:

A bakery in Indiana is still using the 40-year-old Commodore 64 as a cash register | A 1 MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM are enough [1]

A an Atari 1040ST still in use for the a campsite's operations [2]

Commodore 64 Still Powering Auto Repair Shop in Poland [3]

A Japanese kimono factory that still use a Sharp MZ-80K [4]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1hhqa0h/a_bakery_i...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LxPEz9x2fs

[3] https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/c...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWJZFQHklBg

(Note: some of the above links are a few years old, it may be that it is no longer the case)

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

#273

Post by mrighele »

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…

> Many (most?) older retail businesses still use TUIs. They're reliable, consistent, and orders of magnitude faster than GUI systems.

What is sad is that is doesn't have to be that way. But you describe is not an intrisic characteristic of a TUI, but of using keyboard instead of a mouse. You can write a webapp that performs in the same way (modulo the resources needed of course), but it takes extra time and once it works with a mouse there little reasons to put more work for keyboard user (it is not a selling point in most cases).

The main advantage of a TUI is that it forces to write the UI in a certain way, so you get the result automatically.

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

#274

Post by 6r17 »

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 can also buy a car, remove all it's part and do the road on feet. I'm not sure how the car was helpful to move across the roads but hei we have a car.

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

#275

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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."

I use text-mode every day

Cannot speak for others but I lost nothing. On the contrary I gained faster hardware and faster network

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

#276

Post by conductr »

1313ed01 wrote: post #173
conductr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in some cases. But largely, no, it really is not comparable. These TUI interfaces literally had 0 latency for any action. You could paste in text (from clipboard), with \t characters, and it would advance the input focus and could fill out an entire form with once paste action. There's a ton of real world cases where the browser is just too heavy to keep up with fast paced data entry. I've never once seen an ex…

That is not unique to TUIs, but also possible in GUIs where the developers care, and in some games (try the GUI ("tiles") version of Brogue). You can definitely make a GUI that updates in an instant and be fully keyboard-driven, even if that may have been more common last century.

We’re comparing TUI with web browsers for good reason. I don’t see any reason to add game engines to that debate. I have never seen a business client move any application from a TUI to a Unity based UI. I’ve never even heard of anyone considering a game engine in the architecture of a business application. So what you’re saying may well be true but it’s akin to a rare mythical creature, does it even exist?

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

#277

Post by jodacola »

Not using TUIs (unfortunately). Work in a large business on services for real estate transactions. Heavy GUI applications. I’ve actually been investigating adding heavily keyboard-driven interfaces to our GUI apps with my teams because the multi-screen clicking around all our users have to do now is so incredibly slow and inefficient.

Some of my most productive use of software (in both personal and professional settings) have been with TUIs.

Even with all the hype around AI right now (and we’re working with that, too), we can’t not have more traditional UIs to keep a human in the loop when it matters the most and as a fallback for when AI misses the mark - but that doesn’t have to mean it’s all click heavy.

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

#279

Post by FarmerPotato »

trbleclef wrote: post #30
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…

Just the fact that you can use the keyboard is brilliant. I teach high school and most of my computing tasks are in lowest-bidder web GUI messes (lousy UX, no hotkeys) and take so much longer than a keyboard interface would. Even taking roll takes a minute or two longer than it used to.

Ouch.

I remember my high school went big on Gradebusters software--text entry on the Apple IIe (80 column required!) of course that was all keyboard driven.

Tab tab down space down space down down down space.. that was taking attendance.

One problem with GUI is that pointer-warping is unnerving, we don't have facilities like "I clicked, now warp the pointer to the next target" but that's commonplace with text UI.

There's no TAB button on a mouse.

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

#280

Post by FarmerPotato »

galaxy_gas wrote: post #81
trbleclef wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the fact that you can use the keyboard is brilliant. I teach high school and most of my computing tasks are in lowest-bidder web GUI messes (lousy UX, no hotkeys) and take so much longer than a keyboard interface would. Even taking roll takes a minute or two longer than it used to.

I teach at a summer camp once that had custom web app for roll such that it displayed one name at a time to call out and to mark it as present you had to type their given name in a box, otherwise click next with empty input for absent

If I was faced with that, I would switch to paper. Somebody can type it in later.

Also I have no mental imagery of summer camp with networking much less internet. I can't comprehend dropping my kids off at a retail storefront or a church as "summer camp".

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