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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?

#91

Post by maccard »

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…

My experience has always been that TUIs and Terminal emulators these days have massive snags with how they handle control codes and inputs. Pasting into a terminal is a crapshoot of “what on earth is it going to spew back at me”.

It’s perfectly possible to handle large amounts of data by copy and paste on a web browser, you just have to actually support it.

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

#92

Post by andix »

conductr wrote: post #78
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).

I was just giving some examples, it being theoretically possible in SPA isn't really helpful given that nobody will implement it that way. You're basically living in theory. I've literally done the before and after on this a handful of times and it's always worse off. Management will never do that, it's always design by committee, the KPIs won't be defined or will never really have teeth, it will turn into someone's…

> nobody will implement it that way

This is not true. Smart companies do it exactly that way. It saves them a lot of money.

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

#93

Post by dardeaup »

fluoridation wrote: post #90
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.

Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases.

FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.

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

#94

Post by abdullahkhalids »

No, but I learned yesterday that a carpenter and renovation person I know uses a GUI software from 1996 called "FloorPlan Plus 3D 3.01" [1] to design furniture before he builds it. He has a dusty old laptop running Windows XP on which the only thing that works is this software and the connection to the printer.

He showed me his workflow in detail. It's a beautiful software that does everything he needs.

And notice it's only 3.8 MB - smaller than many SaaS software webpages that offer lesser functionality.

[1] https://vetusware.com/download/FloorPlan%20Plus%203D%203.01/...

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

#95

Post by FishByte »

Only a few ago I had been installing new VoIP phones for a small business on the East Coast that had 2 or 3 green screen terminals and an IBM server running some variant of Unix. Most people in the office had terminal emulators, but one fellow in the warehouse section showed off his boxed terminals they had on hand incase one died. It is interesting to me to hear from someone that experienced these anachronistic machines and software. Very unique building, there was a floor between floors you could only get to via the warehouse. It made for an unnaturally long stairwell.

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

#96

Post by kid64 »

There are entire businesses still running on Commodores..

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2562588/this-us-business-sti...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Commodore/comments/avv1j1/this_olda...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.cbm/c/LuLJihA1NCU?pli=1...

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

#97

Post by thesuitonym »

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 will say that these systems take time and effort to learn. You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't too hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have to memorize a lot of product metadata.

One thing that often gets lost in the discussion of TUIs vs GUIs is that this is also true of GUIs. You have to know which icon to click, and it's not always in the same place, and not always labeled. Increasingly, functionality is hidden behind a hamburger menu, and not laid out in logical sections like File, Edit, View, etc menus.

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

#98

Post by fluoridation »

dardeaup wrote: post #93
fluoridation wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases. FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.

Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O? It's still just ASCII characters.

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

#99

Post by OJFord »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #94

No, but I learned yesterday that a carpenter and renovation person I know uses a GUI software from 1996 called "FloorPlan Plus 3D 3.01" [1] to design furniture before he builds it. He has a dusty old laptop running Windows XP on which the only thing that works is this software and the connection to the printer. He showed me his workflow in detail. It's a beautiful software that does everything he needs. And notice it…

Loads of woodworking is done on SketchUp version whatever that's pre-cloud licensing, dating from 2008 I believe. (Cloud aversion, if you will.)

Picasa & Earth era desktop Google software.

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