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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.
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.
Interesting. What sort of database are they running and what is the frontend? Dbase? Foxpro? Turbo Pascal with BDE?
Foxpro is alive and well in our town water utilities company. My fellow student still works on it. I don't know a worse way to waste your best years.
I've seen even older in use. There's an auto parts store in the capital city of Costa Rica which was still running dBase III for its inventory system on a green phosphor screen IBM PC. Not sure if that store is around post-pandemic but it certainly was running around 4 or 5 years ago. Wish I got a video but it's in a particularly sketchy area that I don't really have any reason to return to.
Also, if anyone else ever has to dump an old database to CSV or whatever, I found perl to be the best tool for the job as it handles old encodings just fine. You can go from ancient database to spreadsheet really easy this way. Here's the ticket:
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 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.
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…
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).
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 understood the hierarchical structure and how it worked you could fly through that system because it was all keyboard nav.
Few GUI's have ever been that fast for me even the ones that go out of their way to make everything accessible via the GUI bindable.
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…
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'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 vanity project, they won't even pay someone to optimize the code - quite the opposite, they'll choose to build it on something like Salesforce or some other very non-performant enterprise-y platform, etc, etc. All the TUI get these performance gains out of the box without much additional effort. The constraints of the UI are it's strength as it prevents people from adding all this bloat in the first place. When you leave it up to people, especially business users or UX folks, it will get spoiled. It's almost a law.
A 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.
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…