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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?

#61

Post by mrngm »

Most, if not all, Asian take-out / restaurants in NL still use a TUI for registering your order. Several motorcyle retailers in NL use a TUI for parts management, invoicing, repair tracking. In both cases, people operating these systems develop muscle memory for their everyday usage. I'm not sure if it's still in use, but for at least a decade since 2005 or so, the local university's student canteen used an in-house developed TUI for selling snacks and drinks.

And if you stretch the definition of TUI a bit, the Bloomberg terminal is a fascinating example.

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

#62

Post by perlgeek »

urnicus wrote: post #48
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…

I remember training a new hire on her first day and, about an hour in, she said she needed a coffee break. I never saw her again lol. Typically the first two weeks of training revolved around new hires asking why in the world we used this system before their spirits broke and they reluctantly plunged into the deep end...kind of like being released into the matrix.

Heh, I can relate. We employ a lot of Linux and Windows admins, for them it's usually not a big problem.

We also have a small finance team (typically around 2 employees), and finding somebody with a finance/billing background who is willing to work with TUI on Linux... that was a challenge :-)

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

#63

Post by urnicus »

privong wrote: post #59

An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be faster/easier and that could work against TUI…

This is a definite reality and headache. The learning curve was steep and I literally had somebody walk out after training them for less than two hours.

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

#64

Post by whalesalad »

I remember going to the Pasadena Public Library as a kid (90s) and there were terminals everywhere for interfacing with the digital card catalog system. Pretty sure they were made by Digital/DEC. The black screens with orange glowing text were such a pleasure to play around with. I've been thinking it would be fun to have one of these in my house 24x7 to interface with a Home Assistant TUI.

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

#66

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Costco. Go to a supervisor in a red vest and ask what other Costco has the item that has stocked out and you'll see. No idea what the backend is but the app they use is a terminal emulator that looks straight out of the late 80's.

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

#67

Post by andix »

conductr wrote: post #58
bdavisx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.

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…

It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA. Just get rid of all the fancy design, images, gradients, animations, and so on, and just focus on usability.

The management needs to pick the right concept though, not the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user flows need to take less than x seconds for an average user).

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

#68

Post by HPsquared »

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…

TUIs have a high speed ceiling when muscle memory comes into play.

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

#69

Post by estimator7292 »

perlgeek wrote: post #56
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…

I agree with basically everything you've said, but I'd add that I sometimes wish we had a way to sometimes pop up a GUI for very specific tasks. For example, enabling a fast multi-select of rows in a longish table (or even worse, a tree) is one of the tasks that TUIs don't really excel at. Popping up a PDF or image viewer would also be great. The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from…

Yeah, everything that couldn't be done through the TUI was a shitty web app, or worse, an iPad app. Fortunately those tasks were far less common and mostly dealt with the meta processes like searching national inventory, special corporate account data, things like that. All the day to day was in the TUI

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

#70

Post by kitrose »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #66

Costco. Go to a supervisor in a red vest and ask what other Costco has the item that has stocked out and you'll see. No idea what the backend is but the app they use is a terminal emulator that looks straight out of the late 80's.

AS400 I think
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