Costco still runs its warehouse operations on a TUI application running on AS/400 machines. At least the ones in Canada but I heard it's the same for the US warehouses.
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?
#32I 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 that more TUI's where used.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#33Quite a few large businesses are still running code that was originally written for mainframes in the 60s and 70s. Usually it is large batch operations, but I know of at least two fortune 100 companies that still have non-technical users running terminal emulators to connect to their 'mainframe' to perform some tasks.
I was about to say that's what keeps Sungard in business, but then I googled and saw they are no longer in business. So maybe it is starting to die down.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#34A 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.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#35Textbook example of a piece of software being a shark (perfectly adapted over millennia to being a perfect predator) not a dinosaur (obsolete/extinct).
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#36Yes, 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.
* tab completion for many prompts
* a generic system where outputs can be redirected to a pager, a physical printer, "wc" (word count), into a file etc.
* tabular data also has an alternative CSV representation
* generic fast-jump into menus. This works by supplying commands on the command line, and transitioning to interactive mode when the command list has run out
This is all built in-house; the first git commit is from 1997 but that was "import from CVS" and already 20k LoC, so the actual origins go back further.
It's written in Perl with no framework, just libraries.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#37The last time I went to Steve's Music Store (Toronto, Canada) they were still using the green on black terminals. This was pre-pandemic. Maybe someone can confirm if they still are.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#38Until recently I helped running an old Clipper/dBase TUI application from the late 80s for a family member. We managed to run it successfully until they retired.
vDos (vdos.info) was a huge life saver for this application. It's similar to DOSBox, but more tailored to business applications. The big issue was always to find compatible printers for the old application, vDOS includes some emulation to print to any Windows printer.
There might be free alternatives to vDos, but it worked very well and is reasonably priced.
PS: we also tried to recompile the Clipper source code with Harbour to modern targets. It looked very promising, but they were extremely happy with the vDos solution, which only took 2 hours to deploy.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#39Huge swathes of business software run on stuff built in the 80s and 90s with only incremental changes since.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#40Sam Ash (recently defunct U.S. musical instrument chain) infamously used a system called GERS with a TUI, the components of which IIRC were adapted from either a furniture or carpet store. Well into the 2000s, receipts were still printed in full size carbon paper (triplicate) on dot matrix printers. You'd get a gift "card" that was a literal greeting card with one sheet of that dot matrix printout stuffed in it.
I noticed Guitar Center also using a TUI when I was in there last.