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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?

#81

Post by galaxy_gas »

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.

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

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

#82

Post by privong »

avidiax wrote: post #75
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…

It's also quite common that the customer is now the one that drives the interface. It's the customer's time wasted by the UI, but also the customer typically can't be expected to perform enough orders to actually learn a complicated interface. TUIs persist in industries where there is specialized knowledge needed to even complete the order. For example, an optometrist's office.

I was thinking about employee-facing tools, but I agree that TUIs present an even bigger challenge for casual users / customers.

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

#84

Post by andix »

noir_lord wrote: post #76
andix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Possible yes but there are properties of a TUI vs a GUI where the TUI encourages faster keyboard navigation because when they were common there was only keyboard navigation whereas a GUI comes with it's own upsides (discoverability been the big one). When I was in college (many years ago) the company I worked for used a TUI for its inventory/back office systems (terminal emulator talking to an AS/400) and once you un…

The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too focused on pretty looks, instead of productivity. It's still possible to make a highly productive UI look pretty, but the priority is often completely wrong.

They shouldn't start from a few pretty figma sketches and then try to make them more usable. They should start from user flows, solve how the users can do certain things with maximum productivity, easy navigation, showing the right data together on the same screen, and so on. Only in the end make it pretty.

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

#85

Post by EvanAnderson »

My parents' small businesses still run an xBase-based TUI accounting application for GL, AP, AR, and payroll they first purchased in 1988. Other than a Y2K update it has run unchanged since it was originally installed. Today I have to use DOSBox to make it run but it still works great. I've scabbed-on a few quality-of-life updates (mainly by capturing and processing print jobs) but it mostly just does its thing.

As you'd expect with having a TUI the users can absolutely fly through it. It's extremely efficient for them.

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

#86

Post by actionfromafar »

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…

I made a simple biz app for a friend, with dotnet C# but as a TUI. Seemed the easiest to teach.

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

#87

Post by jamal-kumar »

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.

Here's a photo for anyone curious:

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/111839478303640635

It's also worth noting that the original mainframe hardware has likely been virtualized at this point. Used to work for a company that was doing a lot of that around 15 years ago

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

#89

Post by andix »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #80
andix wrote: post #38

Until 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 Window…

Thanks for the link, afaik my clients are still stuck using their old DOS TUI in a windows 7 VM that has no network access

I've been there, this doesn't work well at all. Actually since Windows NT the DOS subsystem is already an emulation, and it's not that good. DOS applications worked really well up to Windows ME, but with NT/XP/7 it got worse.

vDos was overall much better than running DOS applications directly on Windows. Only drawback was performance. It never ran as fast as on a Pentium III with Windows 98, but still much faster than the original hardware it was designed for (~30 mhz 80386).

Our application was designed for Novell NetWare, back then it even supported row/table locks for dBase files on the shared network drive. This didn't work with Windows NT anymore. But vDos brought back the feature to Windows 10 and SMB shares!

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

#90

Post by fluoridation »

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…

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.
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