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 item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons.
The program had many menu options added and removed over the decades, but the crucial part is that the hotkeys and menu indexes never, ever changed. Once you learn that you can pop into a quick order menu with this specific sequence of five keys, you just automatically open the right menu the moment a customer walks up. No thought, just pure reflex.
UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago. No graphical interface I've ever seen comes even close to the raw utility and speed of these finely tuned TUIs. There is a very, very good reason that the oldest and wealthiest retail businesses still use this ancient software. It works, and it's staggeringly effective, and any conceivable replacement will only be worse. There simply is no effective way to improve it.
Edit: 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. But the key is that it really doesn't take longer than your ordinary training period to become minimally effective. After that, you just pick up the muscle memory as you go. It's pretty analogous to learning touch typing without trying. Your hands just learn where the keys are and after enough time your brain translates words into keystrokes without active thought.
It's a beautiful way to design maximally effective software. We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.
When we built systems in the early 90's (non web GUI), typical requirements were that login/startup would at most take a few seconds and any user action would have to be satisfied with sub second response time. I often think about that when I am waiting for the third SSO redirection to complete or the web page to complete its 200 web requests after a single click. We gained a lot but efficiency seems to have taken a backseat in many cases.
> 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.
The cool thing about TUIs is that everything has an explicit label because it has to be this way.
On the system I use, every menu item was prefixed with a number. You punch in that number on the keyboard and you're in that menu. Just absolutely beautiful functionality
I had a summer job in a place with one of these. When I started, I was like “how does this guy know the 15 digit number for these screws?” By the end, I know the code for screws in general, the code for popular types, metric/imperial, and then it was like length and size. The numbers flashed up as well, so you wouldn’t have to memorize anything, but you quickly didn’t need to see the numbers for popular items.
There is nothing stopping someone from designing GUI stemming from same rules. It just won't "look pretty" and be easy to sell to the suits.
There is also trend with "modern" UI/UX to focus near entirety of effort on user's first few minutes and first few hours with a software, while near zero thought is being put on users having to use given piece of software for hours at end, day in, day out
> UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago.
I'm going to push back a little on that. For several years, MacOS followed a strong UX convention with consistent keyboard shortcuts, menus, layout order, and more. Similarly, Microsoft started with the same, but with everything reversed. At the time, most major cross-platform apps followed these conventions.
Two periods broke these rules: the expansion of web apps and Apple's pivot towards the consolidation of everything into iOS.
First was the dawn of web apps. Faced with two opposing standards, web apps didn't know which model to follow. Business sites stuck with MS standards, while design-centric sites followed Mac standards. As those broke consistency, cross-platform apps gave up and defined their own standards.
Mobile platforms tried to establish new standards. iOS was mostly successful, but started slipping around iOS 7. Material Design was supposed to standardize Android, but Google used it for all Google products, making it more of a standard for the Google brand than Android.
The second started around WWDC 2019. At that point, Apple deprioritized UX standards to focus on architecture updates. The following year, Catalyst was literally a UX catalyst, introducing two competing UX standards for MacOS. From that point forward, Apple really hasn't had a singular UX standard to follow anymore, but they seem to be marching towards iOS standards for all devices.
In the heyday of TUIs, job attrition was much lower. It made sense to create a tool that was extremely hard to use, but also extremely efficient once learned.
In the modern days, attrition is much higher, especially in retail. You need to focus on discoverability and simplifying training as much as possible. Efficiency is secondary at best.
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 :-)
> We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.
GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right hand because I don't know its shortcuts, I feel like half my brain's idling.
I love the system in Autodesk Animator (now: https://github.com/AnimatorPro). Every menu item or button currently on the screen always have a unique initial letter. There is no need to highlight or underline anything. Amazingly this was done without having to use any too obscure labels (but I doubt it would be fun to try to translate it to other languages). Almost every function is two or three single letter key-presses away, and after using the application for a while you will have memorized more and more of those.
Some frequently used functions have their own special single-key shortcuts as well, so instead of having to press C-P (to open the Clip menu and then select Paste) you can just press the ' key, saving the user a key-press every time they do that.
I recently rediscovered that I can do GUI menu things on the keyboard in apps like VLC. Feels like a magic trick -- the best of both worlds. Was it the move to phones that did it? Or did most people not use alt shortcuts?
I worked at a big-box retailer before figuring out a career. They had an old-school TUI that was incredibly fast and well designed. Function keys to do all kinds of lookups and adjustments, advanced menus when you needed them, overall just a well designed system. People took a week or so to get the hang of it but then the skill ceiling was insane, people could get fast.
A few months before I left they switched to a "modern" GUI. It was shockingly bad. The speed of every transaction lowered. Even with optimal use it just took longer. So much time wasted.
Maybe because there are other usages than business data entry and programming? I don’t think I’d be more productive when say editing pictures/movies or producing music with a text interface. Maybe it’s because I grew up with classic Mac OS but computers were not only about productivity, they were a place, and UX peaked with Spatial Finder. Nowadays I spend my working days mostly in text mode and I feel like I’ve lost something.
You're right to point out the speed, but it is just not true that GUIs can't be fast. You can have screens that load quickly and shortcut keys etc.
You just have to make fast navigation and data entry a high priority. The assumptions and approaches people make today mean that generally isn't the case. With a TUI there is a hard limit on the amount of data you can load and that helps as a starting point.
- Often it's hitting a server is that is far away rather in the same building.
- you can put the web server in the same building
- Each page is very heavy with lots of JavaScript etc. loading
- you can build lightweight web pages if you priority small script size, minimal dependencies,
and do profiling to keep things in check
- Data loading delays rendering
- limit the amount of data loaded and displayed at one time
- Data is slow to load
- an older system has limited capacity meaning it's not an option to keep inactive data around
- this means data is more likely to be indexed
- new systems have very large storage capacities, leading to a larger and larger growing db
- eventually default configuration for the database does not allow for everything active to be indexed
- solution is to keep inactive data out of active tables being queried for normal operations
- Slow to navigate with mouse
- you can create a keyboard navigation system
- you can build keyboard shortcuts into every screen
- you can create autocomplete shortcut commands to jump to screens
Many years ago I used a TUI retail/inventory terminal that was running in an SSH session over a painfully slow wireless link. Each keystroke came with several seconds of latency. This was not a problem, though, since I'd memorized all the important menu sequences. I could just punch in a rapid-fire string of keyboard strokes representing an entire transaction and then just wait a few moments for the screens to catch up and a receipt to print.
At work we recently moved from Jira to Linear. It it fully keyboard navigatable and has shortcuts for pretty much everything. It's great! For me the only downside is that al that keyboard greatness clashes with my Vimium browser extension. Oh well...
I worked for a medium sized company who did work with Toro. We supplied many of their lubricants and they had TUI they still used on one of their machines to enter the orders from our company. It was the last of their legacy products, but worked incredibly well.
We had very little issues ever with the system. Our Oracle ERP Net Suite? Had three people dedicated to making sure it ran smoothly. I still remember some of the guys I used to talk to at Toro were "lifers" who were always talking about how easier things were before all the SAAS and ERP software came on the scene.
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 Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
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
This is about keyboard navigation rather than TUI vs GUI, there is no reason you have to render your app with plain text to support efficient keyboard nav.
It's also from an era where you used one piece of software doing routine tasks that rarely changed.
Imagine learning all the keyboard shortcuts for every website you use nowadays.
For example I worked at a video store long ago that had some dos program to manage everything, I didn't own a computer and I didn't use any other software. It was still often a slow turd, and it wasn't networked with the 2 other local stores, so if I wanted to know if a customer had an account there, or if they had some stock there, I had to call.
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
When Lowes made the shift off their in-house TUI point-of-sale to a GUI I heard a lot of fallout from the hardcore TUI users losing their keyboard menuing. Stores and people would build their own “cheat sheets” to fly around the system and it became almost a second language to get to know the TUI.
Knowing that 1.5.6 sends you to scheduling a pickup, or 11.1 to get into the credit card application, versus hunting through graphical hell with a mouse and a touchscreen.
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.
I've also helped running an old Windows 3.1 accounting software. It runs perfectly fine on Windows XP inside a VM.
In 2020 it suddenly came to a halt, because the date pickers just couldn't go further than 2019. Nobody seemed to care in 1992 when it was released.
It was really easy to de-compile the Visual Basic 3 software (perfectly legal where I live). My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries that I just couldn't get a hold of.
In the end I just changed the number 2019 in the binary to 2059 in a hex editor, and it just worked. There was only one occurrence of the number 2019 in the whole binary. I guess I got really lucky.
Edit: It seems like Windows and Visual Basic are not affected by the Unix 2038 problem at all. 16 bit Windows seems to be fine until the year 2107.
> My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries that I just couldn't get a hold of.
This was super common for VB apps. The original architecture of VB was, loosely speaking, a GUI container for various pluggable controls connected to a BASIC runtime. The number of controls that came in the box would vary depending on how fancy a version of VB you bought, and you could plug in additional third party controls in the form of "VBX's" - Visual Basic eXtensions. Even though VBX's were designed mainly for GUI controls, they were the easiest extension point for VB and got extensively used for all sorts of integrations until OLE Automation became more prevalent. (Roughly contemporaneous with the switch to 32-bit.)
I remember using those pre-cloud versions. I loved them. Sketchup was so intuitive (as a 3D modelling noob) it was ridiculous. My tool of choice for making 3D levels for my various OpenGL projects.
I tried to do some rudimentary modelling with modern day Blender and failed. It‘s quite the juggernaut to learn.
What software today do people recommend as an alternative to Sketchup? Is the cloud version any good?
I remember running Sketchup for the first time. I had zero experience but in less than 20 minutes I was drawing large complicated machinery, tractors, buildings.
They made a 3d drawing application without a learning curve O_O
> What software today do people recommend as an alternative to Sketchup?
onshape (web; free to use unless you want to protect your designs) and fusion (autodesk; free license available) are both really popular right now. they work differently than sketchup. i never really made friends with sketchup but the parametric modeling system used in fusion and onshape clicked with me and i really enjoy using them.
IIRC that version made it really easy to design things with dimensional lumber. 2x4”s, 2x6”s etc. I have vague recollections of designing a dog house that way from that time period.
I’m not sure how I’d do the same thing now. If I tried to do that now with Fusion, I’d probably have to build out my own primitive set of lumber sizes, right?
Loved using Google Sketchup back in the day! My high school engineering teacher would show off his 3D modeling of cars during class. It was so cool seeing what you could do with that software!
I wonder if there is a reddit thread with people showing off their surviving Windows XP setups. Mine is a dell tower laying on its side because I harvested a power supply unit from another dell, but it doesn't fit in the case.
I visited a food service company a couple years ago. They had phone reps taking orders from customers (restaurants ordering produce and such). They used a TUI (a "green screen" essentially).
I have never seen people move through a GUI that fast. They were lightning quick with it. They were like an veteran accountant with a ten-key adding machine. It was amazing, and pretty damn sobering when you think how much work we spend on GUIs.
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 didn't have to hunt for the right place to look. You pressed the keys, which were buffered, looked to the appropriate part of the screen and more often than not the information you required appeared as you looked.
Moving to a web based system meant we all had to use mice and spend our days moving them to the correct button on the page all the time. It added hours and hours to the processing.
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 experienced user equal or gain efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after months of acclimation.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Sure, in a browser you can't use all the shortcuts, but still a lot. If you really need it, just wrap it in Electron, Tauri, or any other customizable browser.
That is not unique to TUIs, but also possible in GUIs where the developers care, and in some games (try the GUI ("tiles") version of Brogue). You can definitely make a GUI that updates in an instant and be fully keyboard-driven, even if that may have been more common last century.
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.
The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without looking at the screen.
Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators.
There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's not that hard, if you define the requirements right.
Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively full screen, so no need for responsive design.
The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays and instant responses to user input.
I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade" would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization. Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.
Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are, unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning and effort to achieve that level of mastery. Meanwhile, the interface to traditional musical instruments, while there's been some changes and improvements, have stood the test of time and remain attractive to a lot people who want to make music. Many of the claimed "improvements" that GUI interfaces have over TUIs look in some cases, to me, like busy box toys created for toddlers (this is how I feel about the Windows Ribbon menu widgets). Once something becomes second nature, it's not "I'm putting my fingers in this position" it is "I want to play an A after this series of other notes".
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.
Actual terminal-based TUIs sure, they have small character sets burned into ROM, sized for 50-years-ago prices.
Modern terminals, even the text-based console on a fresh minimal Arch linux install, is going to support Unicode probably without a ton of issues as long as you have a font installed that has the characters. The struggle then for RTL or non-Latin character sets and languages is making the UI fit the words in a way that makes sense.
Yes, you can spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to lay out multilingual text on a terminal, or just use Cairo or some toolkit and let solved problems stay solved.
But the past didn't use ASCII as such, but extended character sets, or multiple characters sets, which did allow for Russian, German, etc. text interfaces.
I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box... Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of decades of time and motion studies.
Yeah I actually help out a friend's family business a lot and we recently had to fix the program for something. It's a foxpro application rewritten in '89 from an original dBase port from earlier in the 80s. I legit had to bust out radare2 and hexdump(analysis)/hex fiend(editing) in order to get the changes done because the original programmer passed away (RIP). Was quite the learning experience but I'm glad that things were simple enough back then to make it something like an easy introduction into the world of reverse engineering for money.
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:
Man, this would have came in handy when I was trying to extract data from .dbf files. Ended up writing something in Go while referencing the dBase IV spec. Lots of trial and error as I recall.
I worked with a steel warehouse about 10 years ago who were using software written in a Data General Business BASIC offshoot dialect, which ran on a proprietary Windows runtime that was essentially emulating the original minicomputer which ran the software when it was originally written in the late 1970s. Thankfully, the emulator at least ran on Windows so we were able to move it to a hosted environment with backups and away from a random tower in a metal warehouse, which is no place for a computer.
We were also tasked with adding new process automation and tooling. Instead of rewriting the system, we reverse engineered the database format and wrote additional tools and utilities around the core tooling, using more modern frameworks. I think this was the right choice and everyone was happy: they didn't have to relearn years of muscle-memory and business process built around the BASIC system, but we could iterate in a modern programming environment.
It wouldn't be surprising if the system was still in use, there was nothing wrong with it and it worked great.
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.
Yes, 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.
Costco runs on TUI. They force you into minimal design and uncomplicated workflows. I bet someone is going to say you need servicenow to manage all this in an easier way. Please don’t listen to that person
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 and keyboard-based tools.
Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.
What I heard from one large chain is they couldn't train warehouse employees on the green screen (3270) inventory app, its too different for them. They just wouldn't do it or would quit.
The other thing is that GUIs can be very slow to load, limiting the potential speed/efficiency. One of the most frustrating experiences is pressing a series of key commands (or just single keys) that SHOULD have performed a very specific series of actions, but the software lagged behind at some point(s) in the flow and something ended up getting messed up because my series of key presses resulted in a totally unintended action.
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.
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.
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.
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
> that the original mainframe hardware has likely been virtualized at this point
The as400 is a mini-computer, the high end of this line overlaps the low end of mainframe.
When I did some consulting work out there many years ago, they had a network of the largest as400's that IBM makes, connected together in one image.
Regarding virtualization: It would have to be on IBM's power processors. IBM does offer cloud services running as400, I have no info on whether Costco is using that or not.
It's a network of high end as400's, the software is custom.
They've burned multiple 100's of millions of dollars on multiple projects trying to re-develop and move off as400's, but they just pulled the plug on their most recent project a year or two ago.
The biggest issue with adoption on new system (based on insiders I've talked to) is that the existing system is very efficient for people knowledgeable about how to use it and the newer GUI based systems just don't match it.
Have you ever been to a Marriott? They have something called MARSHA depending on the property. Once you log in it's basically a command line interface filled with abbreviations. As a high schooler in 2016 I used to train people at a reservations call center on how to use Marsha. It's super unintuitive but surprisingly everyone can wrap their heads around it eventually. Ok maybe 9 out of 10. You could decline to learn Marsha and work for properties that use a GUI like Opera PMS (for us it was mainly IHG properties). You got a pay raise if you learned Marsha. Opera was great, they later started upgrading to some bloated crap with lots of padding between buttons.
IIRC Marsha has transactions so you can build up a reservation and make queries in the process. There's even test properties in production so you can practice making/reserving/retrieving reservations.
This whole thread reminds me of when I saw my first Windows-based ticket dispensing machine at a movie theater. Early in the year there was a screening of the Star Wars trilogy at the Cinema at the North Park Mall in Dallas. Every geek for miles beat a path to the theater. When I got there the line was moving along reasonably quickly and was maybe 20 people deep. No problem. You get to the front of the line, hand over a $10 for two $5 tickets and the cashier pressed the "dispense ticket" button twice. Two tickets came out immediately and you were on your way.
Later that same year Jurassic Park premiered at the same location. Again, every geek for miles around beat a path to the theater. But this time when I arrived, the line was hundreds of people deep and it took about 45 minutes to get to the head of the line (good thing we got there early.) When I got up to the cashier I found they had a new Windows-3.1 based ticket dispensing system. You said how many tickets you wanted and the cashier moved the mouse over a text field, took their hands off the mouse to type "1" or "2" or whatever. If you bought a child's ticket or a senior ticket, that went in a different form field. Then the cashier put their hands back on the mouse, scrolled down and hit the "calculate" button. It told them how much cash to take. They took their hands off the keyboard to collect the cash and then pressed the "dispense tickets" button. Thankfully, the system seemed to actually dispense tickets without crashing. (Windows 3.x had a very bad reliability reputation.)
What had taken 10-15 seconds with the "old school" interface now took about a minute.
Never let anyone tell you "the new system" is better just because it is new.
[[ Also, about this time I remembered Jef Raskin going on about keyboard interfaces, but this was long before the publication of The Humane Interface. And I know we're using the initialism "TUI" in this thread to mean "Text UI", but some people use it to mean "Tactile UI." No one ever got fired for recommending a React Single Page App optimized to quickly swap pages on the current model iPhone. Whether or not that's the best interface for the application is irrelevant. ]]
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.
Fry's Electronics used to have a powerful TUI for getting parts from the cage, the employees could hammer everything in and hit print and turn around to do something else while the screens were still loading.
Later they had some GUI that was used to open ... a terminal of some sort for the same TUI. The GUI made it slower, somehow.
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.
I worked as a sales consultant for AT&T wireless, back during the smartphone boom, at their retail stores. During onboarding everyone was taught how to use the GUI for everything (OPUS, I believe it was called): creating accounts, upgrading accounts, etc. But I noticed a few of the senior reps lived in the TUI (Telegence) and wondered why. When asked they claimed they were just used to it, but I quickly learned how much faster it was by observing them. They were able to process customers so much more quickly, a comparative advantage in commissioned-based sales.
My buddy and I requested access and learned how to use it. Not only did it streamline our process, it allowed us to do everything, where the GUI often omitted certain tasks forcing us reps to call customer service (for example, providing customers with credits after fixing their accounts).
So we lived with both the GUI up for when management walked by and relied on the TUI when we needed/wanted to work quickly.
I bet the system hasn't changed a bit. But I still live in the terminal quite a bit these days.
Lowes and home depot come to mind. Their POS/terminals are just a terminal into an TUI. John Deere, kabota and other ag equipment service & parts providers still largely use a TUI.
I'm not positive whether Target's system from ~15 years ago was a TUI, but a friend worked there in college. He mentioned the process for tax exempt purchases was a bit challenging/not the most common. There were some frequent shoppers who had heard the assistance from the manager enough times, they could walk an employee through what buttons to press to get it setup correctly.
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.
My employer was running Growthpower (ERP software) on an HP 3000 system up until 2018 or so. We replaced it with a "modern" .NET/MSSQL ERP solution that does a lot more, but it's slow and terrible to navigate compared to the old console menu system, and its database is hundreds of tables without a single foreign key. The frontend application makes a long series of sequential queries to build each view... if you're willing to wade through the muck, you can write a server side query that can do in milliseconds what it does in minutes.
I don't think you're blinded by nostalgia. In the early 2000's, I worked in an organization that was migrating away from TUI to web apps. I was one of the web guys back then. We got modern, more maintainable code at the expense of usability. Those TUI interfaces are way faster.
The web failed to live up to the early promises in a lot of ways. We have complicated frameworks, complex architectures, browser headaches, etc. and what we got out of it are user interfaces that are slower than what we replaced and entire categories of bugs that didn't exist before. There's so much extra bullshit in place to overcome the fact that we are using a stateless protocol designed to deliver text documents.
The only things I would really be concerned about with your family company's app are maintainability, availability of security updates, and the use of obsolete software like XP. It sounds like you're already modernizing the code. That old OS is a disaster waiting to happen though.
I like the idea of an internal enterprise app running in the terminal on a reliable FreeBSD or Linux machine. The people who have to live in that app will be faster with a keyboard-driven workflow. A web front end is for customers and situations where you prioritize looks and accessibility over speed and usability. If you implement the the business rules in a modern middle tier and have a good database backing it, you can have the best of both - TUI for internal users and slap on a web front end for external users.
Both of the lumberyards in my city are still running on DOS (or DOS emulation) for their systems, along with quotes printed on dot matrix printers (and no online price sheet). They’re so low margin and old school, I don’t think they get tech upgrades more often than once every two human generations except for new capital equipment, which sucks most of their surplus.
I supported a lumberyard that was like this too. Also, some "modern" laser machines required ancient versions of Windows and required floppy discs. This was about 20 years ago, though.
I’ve worked at many bars and restaurants. The best ordering interface I ever used was at Pizza Hut circa 1999. It was a monochrome TUI (orange). It was ancient-looking even then.
The speed was incredible once you got proficient. Once you got the muscle memory down you could punch in any single pizza order in less than a second. Even something complicated like different toppings on the halves was NBD. Pizza Hut was always coming up with these ridiculous gimmicks and the system could accommodate them seamlessly. Just incredible.
This system probably quietly saved the company millions in its time.
TUI were great for many business applications, specially those in warehouses or factories. They were easier to write and modify. Many business applications were migrated to web for little gain. IMHO.
Been experimenting with charmbracelet's[2] stuff recently to do something similar. Still very early stages so nothing to show off yet but would highly recommend it for anyone else looking into creating a TUI app/business.
There's a completely unironic obituary linked from the LA Times from 1994, which makes me wonder if the scandalous meaning even existed yet in those days?
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.
My first job out of college was over 2 decades ago, and I was hired to work on a web app which was considered new technology. But an important application there that was used by hundreds of people around the country was written with Pick, and the owner of the company also had some local Houston businesses whose Pick applications he occasionally did maintenance work on. The owner had moved from Chicago to Houston at the beginning of the 80s because he was able to get a high-paying job with no degree, but when the oil bust happened he learned Pick programming from an older guy and did so well when he started his own business that he retired early.
I don't know if they're still using it but around 2010 or so a client from the early 2000s got in touch because the UPS they were using for their SCO Unix + serial terminals server had failed and they wanted to replace it. I was amazed that they were still using it. I was even more amazed that the APC UPS they were going to replace the old one with... had a new version of the SCO UPS Monitoring application that they used to automatically do a clean shut down of the server if the power was out too long. Got them all set up and everything kept humming along.
Textbook example of a piece of software being a shark (perfectly adapted over millennia to being a perfect predator) not a dinosaur (obsolete/extinct).
If it’s survived this long, it likely because it has years of small fixes to make it reliable and useful, and more than anything—- predictable for the user.
Modernizing will roll some of that back; I would only consider it if there’s a plan to be around for the years it will take to get good again.
People who are good programmers say this, they have this fantasy, but it's a myth. The opposite is of course true, because there is no maintenance, there are a bajillion agonizing bugs and people simply work around them, the "small fixes" live inside the heads of the people using the application.
Like the fantasy is that the bank uses TUIs and the bank has accumulated years of knowledge and the bank doesn't make mistakes. The bank has extremely well paid staff. Joe Shmoe's TUI app looks like the bank's app, but it is unmaintained, it has accumulated years of problems, not fixes, nobody is fixing them, people who say they fix them cannot possibly be keeping up with the sheer amount of toil and bugs needed for production software. You can see this in any GitHub project, how much insane maintenance is required, for stuff people actually use and has few bugs.
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 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.
It was a customer management and billing system, for a specific industry. Tailored to local requirements and insurance regulations (a lot of things got billed to insurance). There is commercial software available for this purpose, but it's a very small target group, and the products are neither great, nor cheap.
Over time it even got extended to interface with a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to specific locations.
It was deployed on one location with 2-5 concurrent users on the same database. The workflow was something like this: open customer/new customer, read/add notes, register products/services provided, print invoice for customer, print monthly invoice for insurance companies including all the required information (hundreds of pages).
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!
I wrote the main application for my wife's business — she's a psychologist. That was only a few years ago, but as a senior lecturer in the more theoretical parts of computer science, I never really needed fancy UIs with flashy graphical effects. So I built a core engine and used the classic dialog tool as the thin user-facing layer.
At first, my wife was pretty disappointed — as a computer science teacher, wasn't I supposed to know how to build a “real” app? But a few years later, she doesn't want anything else. I even offered to have one of my students create a nicer UI without changing the engine or database, but by now she's completely used to the terminal menus.
The tool keeps a database, collects data through dialog forms, generates PDF invoices with groff, and launches Thunderbird when needed (to send invoices, etc.).
I watched Alien: Earth recently and was admiring the TUIs everywhere. The show takes place in 2120 and they kept up the aesthetics of the original movies. A future full of synthetic humanoids and interstellar ships kept the TUI. I do not remember tablets being in the series, however even those seem to use a similar TUI.
I look forward to my great grandchildren rediscovering the TUI.
I have also met some people who worked at large old insurance companies. They originally used old mainframes and TUI, and the companies still exist. They told me of various things that were done. Of course migrations happened. And interfaces were built so that modern systems could speak with the old, sometimes via terminal emulator. And of course, some old systems still in use far beyond their time.
> I got my start as a script kiddie writing automations for this system with Microsoft Access, VBA, and SendKeys to automate data entry
I've done exactly this for the likes of JP Morgan Chase. Many of their core banking systems are some COBOL/Fortran mainframe (that I know nothing about) but the interface through a TUI client. When they have a desire to work in a more modern fashion, it's SendKeys to the rescue. There's definitely still a lot of TUI's that run the world.
When I worked at State Street everything was done in IBM/370 terminal emulators and a COM component which made is easy to scrape information into Excel. I wasn't really supposed to know about that but found enough code examples which weren't password protected that I could figure it out.
I recall guitar center is still on a green screen back when I worked there in my youth. It was pretty fun learning that interface, fancy keyboard shortcuts etc.
Quite 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.
> This got me thinking: Are other companies still using this type of interface to drive their core operations?
Probably a big chunk of businesses that developed their core systems before the PC era. I don't know if they still use it, but Avis Rent-a-car's main application used by its front-line people was a TUI like that, and the front desk people could fly around int it (like you said).
But most developers ape current trends rather than actually figuring out what would work best, so I'd guess very few user-facing TUIs are being built now.
the accountant who does my taxes, I don't know what software she uses, but just 3 or 4 years ago she sent me a document her computer created that had some serious font display problems. investigating what I had to do to make it right, I discovered that I had to install fonts from Windows 3.1!
I'm starting to maintain a COBOL codebase for my dad's small business. It uses MicroFocus's runtime so it runs fine on Windows 10/11 (but I'm trying to migrate it to OpenCOBOL). He helped write a good chunk of it, but doesn't make any major changes to it anymore. I'm not confident enough to make major changes to it, but I fix some bugs here and there. I ended up writing a python script to parse the database layout for a python-based fuzzy search tool, but I still stuck to a terminal UI for it.
It's been a while since I worked at a bank, but most there core stuff was running in a mainframe and while "modern" front ends exist, the core work uses terminal access.
A key thing modern replacements lose is the input buffer: One can type multiple screens ahead. In a modern GUI application I can enter a shortcut, but then have to wait till the corresponding view/popup/window appears and registered it's event handlers till I can put in the next command. In a mainframe-style TUI, if I remember the sequence, I can type ahead the shortcuts and input for next screen(s) before it's ready. For the experienced user, who runs the same sequence often this is really efficient.
The 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.
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.
Sam 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 worked on a PCI-DSS project at a major consumer electronics retailer almost 17 years ago as an AIX/Solaris specialist.
At that time their 'web store' just put paid orders in a queue and a room full of humans typed the orders into the green screen which had all the actual inventory.
Wegmans’ cash registers still use a TUI. It looks quite clean and friendly compared to the GUI-heavy slop of, say, my time at a major retailer. Speaking of nostalgia, my old gaming store also used a TUI for transactions, and it was highly responsive for anything local (and a PITA anytime it had to communicate with the CO). Also been exposed to a number of businesses these past few years who still use old AIX/Unix/TUI boxes for critical business functions, and most seem happy with them.
And therein lies the rub: if the process works, and modern software doesn’t necessarily offer any better value proposition, then there’s no real reason to migrate. For a lot of companies, the status quo might literally be all they’ll ever need, and IT’s role is to just keep it up, available, and secure as times change. Sure, I’ll side-eye a theater using a Windows box as an intermediary for Ticketmaster to run transactions against their old AIX rig collecting dust in a corner of a closet, but if it works and it’s secure, well, more power to them keeping costs down.
The advice I’d give is not to knock something just because it doesn’t fit current narratives around technology. Our jobs - first and foremost - are to build and support solutions that amplify productivity of humans in a way they can use without external support; whether it’s an ancient TUI or a modern GUI isn’t as relevant as its efficacy.
I think those old TUI systems are analogous to learning Vim. At first, you don't wtf is going on. But, the more time you spend with it, the more it's ingrained, and eventually becomes second nature.
I've seen many of these systems over the years. Before I moved into software full time, the company I was working for was transitioning from a TUI to a GUI based system. The long time sales and warehousing staff absolutely hated it. Which, yes, is par for the course with any new system. But, I really believe there is an (potential) efficiency to a TUI system that makes it superior to a GUI when dealing with prototypical business operations (order entry, inventory lookup, etc).
Which makes me think, is there a market for "modern" TUI systems?
I used to work for a major greeting card company that had a TUI based ERP system from the 90’s until like 5 years go. People were insanely efficient using it, but quite the learning curve to learn all shortcuts and commands.
Working with FoxPro, I'm assuming. I spent several years dealing with xBase systems, and it was honestly a nightmare. I suppose if you've never used any other language or database, you wouldn't notice. Plus, the bit relative to the OP, it's a mostly worthless skill.
A fairly large GDS company has replaced their old “green screen” terminals with a web app that contains the same green screen but with syntax highlighting and hyperlinks inline controls that appear and other quality of life improvements.
This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the system that need it.
I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for many tasks, but I do wonder about touch screens. For some things, touch screens can be plenty fast and the UI adapts to the task.
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.
I struggle to remember myself... but I found this earlier today:
"The years of 1995 and 1996 brought many technological improvements to the Library including the addition of InfoTrac SearchBank, a computerized magazine and newspaper index; ADVANCE, a new Unix-based online library catalog; public access to the Internet with terminals at all library locations;"
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 item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons.
The program had many menu options added and removed over the decades, but the crucial part is that the hotkeys and menu indexes never, ever changed. Once you learn that you can pop into a quick order menu with this specific sequence of five keys, you just automatically open the right menu the moment a customer walks up. No thought, just pure reflex.
UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago. No graphical interface I've ever seen comes even close to the raw utility and speed of these finely tuned TUIs. There is a very, very good reason that the oldest and wealthiest retail businesses still use this ancient software. It works, and it's staggeringly effective, and any conceivable replacement will only be worse. There simply is no effective way to improve it.
Edit: 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. But the key is that it really doesn't take longer than your ordinary training period to become minimally effective. After that, you just pick up the muscle memory as you go. It's pretty analogous to learning touch typing without trying. Your hands just learn where the keys are and after enough time your brain translates words into keystrokes without active thought.
It's a beautiful way to design maximally effective software. We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.
When we built systems in the early 90's (non web GUI), typical requirements were that login/startup would at most take a few seconds and any user action would have to be satisfied with sub second response time. I often think about that when I am waiting for the third SSO redirection to complete or the web page to complete its 200 web requests after a single click. We gained a lot but efficiency seems to have taken a backseat in many cases.
> 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.
The cool thing about TUIs is that everything has an explicit label because it has to be this way.
On the system I use, every menu item was prefixed with a number. You punch in that number on the keyboard and you're in that menu. Just absolutely beautiful functionality
I had a summer job in a place with one of these. When I started, I was like “how does this guy know the 15 digit number for these screws?” By the end, I know the code for screws in general, the code for popular types, metric/imperial, and then it was like length and size. The numbers flashed up as well, so you wouldn’t have to memorize anything, but you quickly didn’t need to see the numbers for popular items.
There is nothing stopping someone from designing GUI stemming from same rules. It just won't "look pretty" and be easy to sell to the suits.
There is also trend with "modern" UI/UX to focus near entirety of effort on user's first few minutes and first few hours with a software, while near zero thought is being put on users having to use given piece of software for hours at end, day in, day out
> UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago.
I'm going to push back a little on that. For several years, MacOS followed a strong UX convention with consistent keyboard shortcuts, menus, layout order, and more. Similarly, Microsoft started with the same, but with everything reversed. At the time, most major cross-platform apps followed these conventions.
Two periods broke these rules: the expansion of web apps and Apple's pivot towards the consolidation of everything into iOS.
First was the dawn of web apps. Faced with two opposing standards, web apps didn't know which model to follow. Business sites stuck with MS standards, while design-centric sites followed Mac standards. As those broke consistency, cross-platform apps gave up and defined their own standards.
Mobile platforms tried to establish new standards. iOS was mostly successful, but started slipping around iOS 7. Material Design was supposed to standardize Android, but Google used it for all Google products, making it more of a standard for the Google brand than Android.
The second started around WWDC 2019. At that point, Apple deprioritized UX standards to focus on architecture updates. The following year, Catalyst was literally a UX catalyst, introducing two competing UX standards for MacOS. From that point forward, Apple really hasn't had a singular UX standard to follow anymore, but they seem to be marching towards iOS standards for all devices.
Times have changed. Priorities have changed.
In the heyday of TUIs, job attrition was much lower. It made sense to create a tool that was extremely hard to use, but also extremely efficient once learned.
In the modern days, attrition is much higher, especially in retail. You need to focus on discoverability and simplifying training as much as possible. Efficiency is secondary at best.
Attrition is higher overall for sure, but retail stores always had high turnover—temporary workers, seasonal workers, high school kids etc…
If you’ve seen any of the GUI retail tools that replaced the TUIs, they certainly aren’t designed for discoverability.
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 :-)
> We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.
GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right hand because I don't know its shortcuts, I feel like half my brain's idling.
We solved this with mnemonics (underlined letter is the shortcut) but then got rid of them for some reason
I love the system in Autodesk Animator (now: https://github.com/AnimatorPro). Every menu item or button currently on the screen always have a unique initial letter. There is no need to highlight or underline anything. Amazingly this was done without having to use any too obscure labels (but I doubt it would be fun to try to translate it to other languages). Almost every function is two or three single letter key-presses away, and after using the application for a while you will have memorized more and more of those.
Some frequently used functions have their own special single-key shortcuts as well, so instead of having to press C-P (to open the Clip menu and then select Paste) you can just press the ' key, saving the user a key-press every time they do that.
Oh yeah - AutoCAD by Autodesk was also like this. Once you memorized the keystrokes, you could fly through your line drawing.
I recently rediscovered that I can do GUI menu things on the keyboard in apps like VLC. Feels like a magic trick -- the best of both worlds. Was it the move to phones that did it? Or did most people not use alt shortcuts?
I worked at a big-box retailer before figuring out a career. They had an old-school TUI that was incredibly fast and well designed. Function keys to do all kinds of lookups and adjustments, advanced menus when you needed them, overall just a well designed system. People took a week or so to get the hang of it but then the skill ceiling was insane, people could get fast.
A few months before I left they switched to a "modern" GUI. It was shockingly bad. The speed of every transaction lowered. Even with optimal use it just took longer. So much time wasted.
Maybe because there are other usages than business data entry and programming? I don’t think I’d be more productive when say editing pictures/movies or producing music with a text interface. Maybe it’s because I grew up with classic Mac OS but computers were not only about productivity, they were a place, and UX peaked with Spatial Finder. Nowadays I spend my working days mostly in text mode and I feel like I’ve lost something.
You're right to point out the speed, but it is just not true that GUIs can't be fast. You can have screens that load quickly and shortcut keys etc.
You just have to make fast navigation and data entry a high priority. The assumptions and approaches people make today mean that generally isn't the case. With a TUI there is a hard limit on the amount of data you can load and that helps as a starting point.
- Often it's hitting a server is that is far away rather in the same building.
- Each page is very heavy with lots of JavaScript etc. loading - Data loading delays rendering - Data is slow to load - Slow to navigate with mouseMany years ago I used a TUI retail/inventory terminal that was running in an SSH session over a painfully slow wireless link. Each keystroke came with several seconds of latency. This was not a problem, though, since I'd memorized all the important menu sequences. I could just punch in a rapid-fire string of keyboard strokes representing an entire transaction and then just wait a few moments for the screens to catch up and a receipt to print.
At work we recently moved from Jira to Linear. It it fully keyboard navigatable and has shortcuts for pretty much everything. It's great! For me the only downside is that al that keyboard greatness clashes with my Vimium browser extension. Oh well...
Similar story.
I worked for a medium sized company who did work with Toro. We supplied many of their lubricants and they had TUI they still used on one of their machines to enter the orders from our company. It was the last of their legacy products, but worked incredibly well. We had very little issues ever with the system. Our Oracle ERP Net Suite? Had three people dedicated to making sure it ran smoothly. I still remember some of the guys I used to talk to at Toro were "lifers" who were always talking about how easier things were before all the SAAS and ERP software came on the scene.
The stories they had were pretty entertaining.
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 Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
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
This is about keyboard navigation rather than TUI vs GUI, there is no reason you have to render your app with plain text to support efficient keyboard nav.
It's also from an era where you used one piece of software doing routine tasks that rarely changed.
Imagine learning all the keyboard shortcuts for every website you use nowadays.
For example I worked at a video store long ago that had some dos program to manage everything, I didn't own a computer and I didn't use any other software. It was still often a slow turd, and it wasn't networked with the 2 other local stores, so if I wanted to know if a customer had an account there, or if they had some stock there, I had to call.
That's true, but if the use case is to display text and to optimize keyboard navigation, then the added complexity of a GUI might be unnecessary.
Variable width fonts and style sheets are nice, though.
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
Somebody needs to be fired for that sort of UI...
I've probably made that sort of UI without realizing it...
False absence, is better than false presence. Especially with kids.
The UX is optimizing for accuracy over ease of use, and in this case is likely intentionally difficult to use.
When Lowes made the shift off their in-house TUI point-of-sale to a GUI I heard a lot of fallout from the hardcore TUI users losing their keyboard menuing. Stores and people would build their own “cheat sheets” to fly around the system and it became almost a second language to get to know the TUI.
Knowing that 1.5.6 sends you to scheduling a pickup, or 11.1 to get into the credit card application, versus hunting through graphical hell with a mouse and a touchscreen.
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/...
I've also helped running an old Windows 3.1 accounting software. It runs perfectly fine on Windows XP inside a VM.
In 2020 it suddenly came to a halt, because the date pickers just couldn't go further than 2019. Nobody seemed to care in 1992 when it was released.
It was really easy to de-compile the Visual Basic 3 software (perfectly legal where I live). My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries that I just couldn't get a hold of.
In the end I just changed the number 2019 in the binary to 2059 in a hex editor, and it just worked. There was only one occurrence of the number 2019 in the whole binary. I guess I got really lucky.
Edit: It seems like Windows and Visual Basic are not affected by the Unix 2038 problem at all. 16 bit Windows seems to be fine until the year 2107.
> My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries that I just couldn't get a hold of.
This was super common for VB apps. The original architecture of VB was, loosely speaking, a GUI container for various pluggable controls connected to a BASIC runtime. The number of controls that came in the box would vary depending on how fancy a version of VB you bought, and you could plug in additional third party controls in the form of "VBX's" - Visual Basic eXtensions. Even though VBX's were designed mainly for GUI controls, they were the easiest extension point for VB and got extensively used for all sorts of integrations until OLE Automation became more prevalent. (Roughly contemporaneous with the switch to 32-bit.)
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.
I remember using those pre-cloud versions. I loved them. Sketchup was so intuitive (as a 3D modelling noob) it was ridiculous. My tool of choice for making 3D levels for my various OpenGL projects.
I tried to do some rudimentary modelling with modern day Blender and failed. It‘s quite the juggernaut to learn.
What software today do people recommend as an alternative to Sketchup? Is the cloud version any good?
I remember running Sketchup for the first time. I had zero experience but in less than 20 minutes I was drawing large complicated machinery, tractors, buildings.
They made a 3d drawing application without a learning curve O_O
> What software today do people recommend as an alternative to Sketchup?
onshape (web; free to use unless you want to protect your designs) and fusion (autodesk; free license available) are both really popular right now. they work differently than sketchup. i never really made friends with sketchup but the parametric modeling system used in fusion and onshape clicked with me and i really enjoy using them.
IIRC that version made it really easy to design things with dimensional lumber. 2x4”s, 2x6”s etc. I have vague recollections of designing a dog house that way from that time period.
I’m not sure how I’d do the same thing now. If I tried to do that now with Fusion, I’d probably have to build out my own primitive set of lumber sizes, right?
All three were bought by Google, they didn't start there.
Loved using Google Sketchup back in the day! My high school engineering teacher would show off his 3D modeling of cars during class. It was so cool seeing what you could do with that software!
A bit of searching turns up lots of references to SketchUp Make 2017. Could this be what you mean?
I wonder if there is a reddit thread with people showing off their surviving Windows XP setups. Mine is a dell tower laying on its side because I harvested a power supply unit from another dell, but it doesn't fit in the case.
I visited a food service company a couple years ago. They had phone reps taking orders from customers (restaurants ordering produce and such). They used a TUI (a "green screen" essentially).
I have never seen people move through a GUI that fast. They were lightning quick with it. They were like an veteran accountant with a ten-key adding machine. It was amazing, and pretty damn sobering when you think how much work we spend on GUIs.
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 didn't have to hunt for the right place to look. You pressed the keys, which were buffered, looked to the appropriate part of the screen and more often than not the information you required appeared as you looked.
Moving to a web based system meant we all had to use mice and spend our days moving them to the correct button on the page all the time. It added hours and hours to the processing.
Bring back the TUI!
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 experienced user equal or gain efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after months of acclimation.
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 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.
> nobody will implement it that way
This is not true. Smart companies do it exactly that way. It saves them a lot of money.
I've never seen a smart company then.
I have a hard time believing this. The medium impacts interaction.
Do you have concrete examples in mind that we can review?
The things I've worked on were custom tools for internal use. Built on top of existing systems, to improve productivity for specific workflows.
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 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.
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.
> The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too focused on pretty looks,
It may be pretty but it makes me puke.
The "modern UX design" is based on layers upon layers of abstraction and "cheap" interfaces. Which one is the button ? Where is the scrollbar ?
> It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA.
Yeah, I guess I could say that before I tried rebinding ctrl-w and some of the Fx keys (like F12).
Sure, in a browser you can't use all the shortcuts, but still a lot. If you really need it, just wrap it in Electron, Tauri, or any other customizable browser.
> It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA.
Sending http response, waiting for reply. Http 200 ok
and so on and so forth. Web sucks. Of course, you can have something like Jira, bur still sucks.
That is not unique to TUIs, but also possible in GUIs where the developers care, and in some games (try the GUI ("tiles") version of Brogue). You can definitely make a GUI that updates in an instant and be fully keyboard-driven, even if that may have been more common last century.
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.
The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without looking at the screen.
Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators.
There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
How do I implement type-ahead in Qt or GTK application?
A large fraction of the entire point of a GUI is not being keyboard-centric.
Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's not that hard, if you define the requirements right.
Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively full screen, so no need for responsive design.
The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays and instant responses to user input.
I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade" would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization. Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.
Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are, unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning and effort to achieve that level of mastery. Meanwhile, the interface to traditional musical instruments, while there's been some changes and improvements, have stood the test of time and remain attractive to a lot people who want to make music. Many of the claimed "improvements" that GUI interfaces have over TUIs look in some cases, to me, like busy box toys created for toddlers (this is how I feel about the Windows Ribbon menu widgets). Once something becomes second nature, it's not "I'm putting my fingers in this position" it is "I want to play an A after this series of other notes".
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.
Actual terminal-based TUIs sure, they have small character sets burned into ROM, sized for 50-years-ago prices.
Modern terminals, even the text-based console on a fresh minimal Arch linux install, is going to support Unicode probably without a ton of issues as long as you have a font installed that has the characters. The struggle then for RTL or non-Latin character sets and languages is making the UI fit the words in a way that makes sense.
Yes, you can spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to lay out multilingual text on a terminal, or just use Cairo or some toolkit and let solved problems stay solved.
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.
But the past didn't use ASCII as such, but extended character sets, or multiple characters sets, which did allow for Russian, German, etc. text interfaces.
Yes! I was just pointing it out to show that they had at least thought of Japanese users (in some small way).
I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box... Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of decades of time and motion studies.
Back then people probably got promoted for such things.
Now they get promoted for changing things to appease MBAs and giving their boss something to talk about to their boss.
America has fallen, and we can't get back up.
TUIs have a high speed ceiling when muscle memory comes into play.
Yeah I actually help out a friend's family business a lot and we recently had to fix the program for something. It's a foxpro application rewritten in '89 from an original dBase port from earlier in the 80s. I legit had to bust out radare2 and hexdump(analysis)/hex fiend(editing) in order to get the changes done because the original programmer passed away (RIP). Was quite the learning experience but I'm glad that things were simple enough back then to make it something like an easy introduction into the world of reverse engineering for money.
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:
https://www.burtonsys.com/download/dbf2csv.php
> https://www.burtonsys.com/download/dbf2csv.php
Man, this would have came in handy when I was trying to extract data from .dbf files. Ended up writing something in Go while referencing the dBase IV spec. Lots of trial and error as I recall.
PHP used to have dBase database support. Also older version of Excel can just open dBase. LibreOffice seems to support it too.
What a lucky friend - you're a superhero.
I worked with a steel warehouse about 10 years ago who were using software written in a Data General Business BASIC offshoot dialect, which ran on a proprietary Windows runtime that was essentially emulating the original minicomputer which ran the software when it was originally written in the late 1970s. Thankfully, the emulator at least ran on Windows so we were able to move it to a hosted environment with backups and away from a random tower in a metal warehouse, which is no place for a computer.
We were also tasked with adding new process automation and tooling. Instead of rewriting the system, we reverse engineered the database format and wrote additional tools and utilities around the core tooling, using more modern frameworks. I think this was the right choice and everyone was happy: they didn't have to relearn years of muscle-memory and business process built around the BASIC system, but we could iterate in a modern programming environment.
It wouldn't be surprising if the system was still in use, there was nothing wrong with it and it worked great.
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.
I think the Bloomberg terminal counts as a TUI. It's also probably the most complex and heavily used TUI in existence.
Yes, 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.
I think you are about a decade off on your first git commit, unless you meant they went cvs -> svn or something and then ended up on git later.
Costco runs on TUI. They force you into minimal design and uncomplicated workflows. I bet someone is going to say you need servicenow to manage all this in an easier way. Please don’t listen to that person
Love walking by the AS/400 terminal emulator screens after checkout. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
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 and keyboard-based tools.
Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.
What I heard from one large chain is they couldn't train warehouse employees on the green screen (3270) inventory app, its too different for them. They just wouldn't do it or would quit.
I don't think it's an either/or situation.
An application I worked on was a GUI but (at the user's request) we loaded that thing up with hotkeys like no other.
Watching experienced employees operate a gui I worked on was a fascinating experience. They were so fucking fast!
I think the problem is that GUI authors often put hotkeys in as an afterthought.
The other thing is that GUIs can be very slow to load, limiting the potential speed/efficiency. One of the most frustrating experiences is pressing a series of key commands (or just single keys) that SHOULD have performed a very specific series of actions, but the software lagged behind at some point(s) in the flow and something ended up getting messed up because my series of key presses resulted in a totally unintended action.
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.
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.
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
> that the original mainframe hardware has likely been virtualized at this point
The as400 is a mini-computer, the high end of this line overlaps the low end of mainframe.
When I did some consulting work out there many years ago, they had a network of the largest as400's that IBM makes, connected together in one image.
Regarding virtualization: It would have to be on IBM's power processors. IBM does offer cloud services running as400, I have no info on whether Costco is using that or not.
It's a network of high end as400's, the software is custom.
They've burned multiple 100's of millions of dollars on multiple projects trying to re-develop and move off as400's, but they just pulled the plug on their most recent project a year or two ago.
The biggest issue with adoption on new system (based on insiders I've talked to) is that the existing system is very efficient for people knowledgeable about how to use it and the newer GUI based systems just don't match it.
Looks like an AS/400
AS400 in their case
AS400 I think
Have you ever been to a Marriott? They have something called MARSHA depending on the property. Once you log in it's basically a command line interface filled with abbreviations. As a high schooler in 2016 I used to train people at a reservations call center on how to use Marsha. It's super unintuitive but surprisingly everyone can wrap their heads around it eventually. Ok maybe 9 out of 10. You could decline to learn Marsha and work for properties that use a GUI like Opera PMS (for us it was mainly IHG properties). You got a pay raise if you learned Marsha. Opera was great, they later started upgrading to some bloated crap with lots of padding between buttons.
IIRC Marsha has transactions so you can build up a reservation and make queries in the process. There's even test properties in production so you can practice making/reserving/retrieving reservations.
This whole thread reminds me of when I saw my first Windows-based ticket dispensing machine at a movie theater. Early in the year there was a screening of the Star Wars trilogy at the Cinema at the North Park Mall in Dallas. Every geek for miles beat a path to the theater. When I got there the line was moving along reasonably quickly and was maybe 20 people deep. No problem. You get to the front of the line, hand over a $10 for two $5 tickets and the cashier pressed the "dispense ticket" button twice. Two tickets came out immediately and you were on your way.
Later that same year Jurassic Park premiered at the same location. Again, every geek for miles around beat a path to the theater. But this time when I arrived, the line was hundreds of people deep and it took about 45 minutes to get to the head of the line (good thing we got there early.) When I got up to the cashier I found they had a new Windows-3.1 based ticket dispensing system. You said how many tickets you wanted and the cashier moved the mouse over a text field, took their hands off the mouse to type "1" or "2" or whatever. If you bought a child's ticket or a senior ticket, that went in a different form field. Then the cashier put their hands back on the mouse, scrolled down and hit the "calculate" button. It told them how much cash to take. They took their hands off the keyboard to collect the cash and then pressed the "dispense tickets" button. Thankfully, the system seemed to actually dispense tickets without crashing. (Windows 3.x had a very bad reliability reputation.)
What had taken 10-15 seconds with the "old school" interface now took about a minute.
Never let anyone tell you "the new system" is better just because it is new.
[[ Also, about this time I remembered Jef Raskin going on about keyboard interfaces, but this was long before the publication of The Humane Interface. And I know we're using the initialism "TUI" in this thread to mean "Text UI", but some people use it to mean "Tactile UI." No one ever got fired for recommending a React Single Page App optimized to quickly swap pages on the current model iPhone. Whether or not that's the best interface for the application is irrelevant. ]]
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.
Fry's Electronics used to have a powerful TUI for getting parts from the cage, the employees could hammer everything in and hit print and turn around to do something else while the screens were still loading.
Later they had some GUI that was used to open ... a terminal of some sort for the same TUI. The GUI made it slower, somehow.
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.
I worked as a sales consultant for AT&T wireless, back during the smartphone boom, at their retail stores. During onboarding everyone was taught how to use the GUI for everything (OPUS, I believe it was called): creating accounts, upgrading accounts, etc. But I noticed a few of the senior reps lived in the TUI (Telegence) and wondered why. When asked they claimed they were just used to it, but I quickly learned how much faster it was by observing them. They were able to process customers so much more quickly, a comparative advantage in commissioned-based sales.
My buddy and I requested access and learned how to use it. Not only did it streamline our process, it allowed us to do everything, where the GUI often omitted certain tasks forcing us reps to call customer service (for example, providing customers with credits after fixing their accounts).
So we lived with both the GUI up for when management walked by and relied on the TUI when we needed/wanted to work quickly.
I bet the system hasn't changed a bit. But I still live in the terminal quite a bit these days.
Lowes and home depot come to mind. Their POS/terminals are just a terminal into an TUI. John Deere, kabota and other ag equipment service & parts providers still largely use a TUI.
Also, Costco uses AS/400. Applications that are pure function over form are amazing
I'm not positive whether Target's system from ~15 years ago was a TUI, but a friend worked there in college. He mentioned the process for tax exempt purchases was a bit challenging/not the most common. There were some frequent shoppers who had heard the assistance from the manager enough times, they could walk an employee through what buttons to press to get it setup correctly.
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 that more TUI's where used.
I made a simple biz app for a friend, with dotnet C# but as a TUI. Seemed the easiest to teach.
Super interesting study. Training new staff was always the most challenging aspect of the software.
Anyone who has ever worked with legit 10-key operators understands why many companies were loathe to migrate to modern graphical interfaces.
Some of the fastest manual data entry I've ever seen was by operators entering claim information into a medical billing system based on MUMPS.
Keep all hands and feet away.
My employer was running Growthpower (ERP software) on an HP 3000 system up until 2018 or so. We replaced it with a "modern" .NET/MSSQL ERP solution that does a lot more, but it's slow and terrible to navigate compared to the old console menu system, and its database is hundreds of tables without a single foreign key. The frontend application makes a long series of sequential queries to build each view... if you're willing to wade through the muck, you can write a server side query that can do in milliseconds what it does in minutes.
I don't think you're blinded by nostalgia. In the early 2000's, I worked in an organization that was migrating away from TUI to web apps. I was one of the web guys back then. We got modern, more maintainable code at the expense of usability. Those TUI interfaces are way faster.
The web failed to live up to the early promises in a lot of ways. We have complicated frameworks, complex architectures, browser headaches, etc. and what we got out of it are user interfaces that are slower than what we replaced and entire categories of bugs that didn't exist before. There's so much extra bullshit in place to overcome the fact that we are using a stateless protocol designed to deliver text documents.
The only things I would really be concerned about with your family company's app are maintainability, availability of security updates, and the use of obsolete software like XP. It sounds like you're already modernizing the code. That old OS is a disaster waiting to happen though.
I like the idea of an internal enterprise app running in the terminal on a reliable FreeBSD or Linux machine. The people who have to live in that app will be faster with a keyboard-driven workflow. A web front end is for customers and situations where you prioritize looks and accessibility over speed and usability. If you implement the the business rules in a modern middle tier and have a good database backing it, you can have the best of both - TUI for internal users and slap on a web front end for external users.
Both of the lumberyards in my city are still running on DOS (or DOS emulation) for their systems, along with quotes printed on dot matrix printers (and no online price sheet). They’re so low margin and old school, I don’t think they get tech upgrades more often than once every two human generations except for new capital equipment, which sucks most of their surplus.
I still use a dot matrix in my office lol. I love the sound and they are so cheap to operate.
I supported a lumberyard that was like this too. Also, some "modern" laser machines required ancient versions of Windows and required floppy discs. This was about 20 years ago, though.
I’ve worked at many bars and restaurants. The best ordering interface I ever used was at Pizza Hut circa 1999. It was a monochrome TUI (orange). It was ancient-looking even then.
The speed was incredible once you got proficient. Once you got the muscle memory down you could punch in any single pizza order in less than a second. Even something complicated like different toppings on the halves was NBD. Pizza Hut was always coming up with these ridiculous gimmicks and the system could accommodate them seamlessly. Just incredible.
This system probably quietly saved the company millions in its time.
TUI were great for many business applications, specially those in warehouses or factories. They were easier to write and modify. Many business applications were migrated to web for little gain. IMHO.
I immediately think of Terminal Coffee[1].
Been experimenting with charmbracelet's[2] stuff recently to do something similar. Still very early stages so nothing to show off yet but would highly recommend it for anyone else looking into creating a TUI app/business.
[1] https://www.terminal.shop/ [2] https://github.com/charmbracelet
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
I should become a maintainer to keep the legacy going…
> It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick
Wikipedia vandals these days...
Dick Pick, initially released on GIRLS.
Wow
There's a completely unironic obituary linked from the LA Times from 1994, which makes me wonder if the scandalous meaning even existed yet in those days?
Hahahahahaha - the kids are alright
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.
My first job out of college was over 2 decades ago, and I was hired to work on a web app which was considered new technology. But an important application there that was used by hundreds of people around the country was written with Pick, and the owner of the company also had some local Houston businesses whose Pick applications he occasionally did maintenance work on. The owner had moved from Chicago to Houston at the beginning of the 80s because he was able to get a high-paying job with no degree, but when the oil bust happened he learned Pick programming from an older guy and did so well when he started his own business that he retired early.
The https://ratatui.rs/ TUI framework has a backend called Ratzilla (https://github.com/orhun/ratzilla) that lets you build web applications which look and feel like TUIs.
I don't know if they're still using it but around 2010 or so a client from the early 2000s got in touch because the UPS they were using for their SCO Unix + serial terminals server had failed and they wanted to replace it. I was amazed that they were still using it. I was even more amazed that the APC UPS they were going to replace the old one with... had a new version of the SCO UPS Monitoring application that they used to automatically do a clean shut down of the server if the power was out too long. Got them all set up and everything kept humming along.
Textbook example of a piece of software being a shark (perfectly adapted over millennia to being a perfect predator) not a dinosaur (obsolete/extinct).
That's a great analogy! "Sharkware"
If it’s survived this long, it likely because it has years of small fixes to make it reliable and useful, and more than anything—- predictable for the user.
Modernizing will roll some of that back; I would only consider it if there’s a plan to be around for the years it will take to get good again.
Eh, I bet a lot of this stuff is running on some old SCO box held together with ducttape and prayers, because the vendor is long gone/dead.
People who are good programmers say this, they have this fantasy, but it's a myth. The opposite is of course true, because there is no maintenance, there are a bajillion agonizing bugs and people simply work around them, the "small fixes" live inside the heads of the people using the application.
Like the fantasy is that the bank uses TUIs and the bank has accumulated years of knowledge and the bank doesn't make mistakes. The bank has extremely well paid staff. Joe Shmoe's TUI app looks like the bank's app, but it is unmaintained, it has accumulated years of problems, not fixes, nobody is fixing them, people who say they fix them cannot possibly be keeping up with the sheer amount of toil and bugs needed for production software. You can see this in any GitHub project, how much insane maintenance is required, for stuff people actually use and has few bugs.
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 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.
What type of business was it? What kind of functionality did this TUI application provide?
It was a customer management and billing system, for a specific industry. Tailored to local requirements and insurance regulations (a lot of things got billed to insurance). There is commercial software available for this purpose, but it's a very small target group, and the products are neither great, nor cheap.
Over time it even got extended to interface with a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to specific locations.
It was deployed on one location with 2-5 concurrent users on the same database. The workflow was something like this: open customer/new customer, read/add notes, register products/services provided, print invoice for customer, print monthly invoice for insurance companies including all the required information (hundreds of pages).
> a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to specific locations
The joys of large business transactions handled by .txt files (or equivalent) over FTP (or equivalent). It almost feels… like digital fax, in a way.
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!
I wrote the main application for my wife's business — she's a psychologist. That was only a few years ago, but as a senior lecturer in the more theoretical parts of computer science, I never really needed fancy UIs with flashy graphical effects. So I built a core engine and used the classic dialog tool as the thin user-facing layer.
At first, my wife was pretty disappointed — as a computer science teacher, wasn't I supposed to know how to build a “real” app? But a few years later, she doesn't want anything else. I even offered to have one of my students create a nicer UI without changing the engine or database, but by now she's completely used to the terminal menus.
The tool keeps a database, collects data through dialog forms, generates PDF invoices with groff, and launches Thunderbird when needed (to send invoices, etc.).
<At first, my wife was pretty disappointed
I've got a mental picture of you excitedly unveiling your work to her. Glad she came around and very cool.
I watched Alien: Earth recently and was admiring the TUIs everywhere. The show takes place in 2120 and they kept up the aesthetics of the original movies. A future full of synthetic humanoids and interstellar ships kept the TUI. I do not remember tablets being in the series, however even those seem to use a similar TUI.
I look forward to my great grandchildren rediscovering the TUI.
Reminds me of this story from 2021
https://hackaday.com/2021/10/06/atari-st-still-manages-campg...
I have also met some people who worked at large old insurance companies. They originally used old mainframes and TUI, and the companies still exist. They told me of various things that were done. Of course migrations happened. And interfaces were built so that modern systems could speak with the old, sometimes via terminal emulator. And of course, some old systems still in use far beyond their time.
> I got my start as a script kiddie writing automations for this system with Microsoft Access, VBA, and SendKeys to automate data entry
I've done exactly this for the likes of JP Morgan Chase. Many of their core banking systems are some COBOL/Fortran mainframe (that I know nothing about) but the interface through a TUI client. When they have a desire to work in a more modern fashion, it's SendKeys to the rescue. There's definitely still a lot of TUI's that run the world.
When I worked at State Street everything was done in IBM/370 terminal emulators and a COM component which made is easy to scrape information into Excel. I wasn't really supposed to know about that but found enough code examples which weren't password protected that I could figure it out.
I recall guitar center is still on a green screen back when I worked there in my youth. It was pretty fun learning that interface, fancy keyboard shortcuts etc.
Quite 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.
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...
> This got me thinking: Are other companies still using this type of interface to drive their core operations?
Probably a big chunk of businesses that developed their core systems before the PC era. I don't know if they still use it, but Avis Rent-a-car's main application used by its front-line people was a TUI like that, and the front desk people could fly around int it (like you said).
But most developers ape current trends rather than actually figuring out what would work best, so I'd guess very few user-facing TUIs are being built now.
the accountant who does my taxes, I don't know what software she uses, but just 3 or 4 years ago she sent me a document her computer created that had some serious font display problems. investigating what I had to do to make it right, I discovered that I had to install fonts from Windows 3.1!
I'm starting to maintain a COBOL codebase for my dad's small business. It uses MicroFocus's runtime so it runs fine on Windows 10/11 (but I'm trying to migrate it to OpenCOBOL). He helped write a good chunk of it, but doesn't make any major changes to it anymore. I'm not confident enough to make major changes to it, but I fix some bugs here and there. I ended up writing a python script to parse the database layout for a python-based fuzzy search tool, but I still stuck to a terminal UI for it.
There's this Polish article about a company that balance drive shafts with commodore c64
https://www.trojmiasto.pl/tv/Commodore-64-maszyna-do-wywazan...
It's been a while since I worked at a bank, but most there core stuff was running in a mainframe and while "modern" front ends exist, the core work uses terminal access.
A key thing modern replacements lose is the input buffer: One can type multiple screens ahead. In a modern GUI application I can enter a shortcut, but then have to wait till the corresponding view/popup/window appears and registered it's event handlers till I can put in the next command. In a mainframe-style TUI, if I remember the sequence, I can type ahead the shortcuts and input for next screen(s) before it's ready. For the experienced user, who runs the same sequence often this is really efficient.
The 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.
My buddy works at a rather large auto auction and uses a TUI extensively, only jumping out to copy stuff from a few GUIs and pasting it into the TUI.
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.
Just recently seen this sort of trend of text-based UI or "TUI" applications in the terminal which has caught my attention ever since Claude Code.
Where can I find these TUI applications to look at?
https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
Sam 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.
Leroy Merlin (French multinational retail company, home improvement and gardening products) still runs these systems at the PoS, at least in Spain.
Count your blessings.
And if anyone suggests rewriting it, fire them.
Huge swathes of business software run on stuff built in the 80s and 90s with only incremental changes since.
I worked on a PCI-DSS project at a major consumer electronics retailer almost 17 years ago as an AIX/Solaris specialist.
At that time their 'web store' just put paid orders in a queue and a room full of humans typed the orders into the green screen which had all the actual inventory.
Somewhere in 2004 I upgraded a TUI interface for a major advertising company in Belgium to support €. They used it for many years since, AFAIK.
Wegmans’ cash registers still use a TUI. It looks quite clean and friendly compared to the GUI-heavy slop of, say, my time at a major retailer. Speaking of nostalgia, my old gaming store also used a TUI for transactions, and it was highly responsive for anything local (and a PITA anytime it had to communicate with the CO). Also been exposed to a number of businesses these past few years who still use old AIX/Unix/TUI boxes for critical business functions, and most seem happy with them.
And therein lies the rub: if the process works, and modern software doesn’t necessarily offer any better value proposition, then there’s no real reason to migrate. For a lot of companies, the status quo might literally be all they’ll ever need, and IT’s role is to just keep it up, available, and secure as times change. Sure, I’ll side-eye a theater using a Windows box as an intermediary for Ticketmaster to run transactions against their old AIX rig collecting dust in a corner of a closet, but if it works and it’s secure, well, more power to them keeping costs down.
The advice I’d give is not to knock something just because it doesn’t fit current narratives around technology. Our jobs - first and foremost - are to build and support solutions that amplify productivity of humans in a way they can use without external support; whether it’s an ancient TUI or a modern GUI isn’t as relevant as its efficacy.
I think those old TUI systems are analogous to learning Vim. At first, you don't wtf is going on. But, the more time you spend with it, the more it's ingrained, and eventually becomes second nature.
I've seen many of these systems over the years. Before I moved into software full time, the company I was working for was transitioning from a TUI to a GUI based system. The long time sales and warehousing staff absolutely hated it. Which, yes, is par for the course with any new system. But, I really believe there is an (potential) efficiency to a TUI system that makes it superior to a GUI when dealing with prototypical business operations (order entry, inventory lookup, etc).
Which makes me think, is there a market for "modern" TUI systems?
I used to work for a major greeting card company that had a TUI based ERP system from the 90’s until like 5 years go. People were insanely efficient using it, but quite the learning curve to learn all shortcuts and commands.
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.
What do you consider waste? Living in a small town? Working for a utility company? Working with outdated software?
Working with FoxPro, I'm assuming. I spent several years dealing with xBase systems, and it was honestly a nightmare. I suppose if you've never used any other language or database, you wouldn't notice. Plus, the bit relative to the OP, it's a mostly worthless skill.
When i checkout at costco i see their TUI and im so curious about it.
A fairly large GDS company has replaced their old “green screen” terminals with a web app that contains the same green screen but with syntax highlighting and hyperlinks inline controls that appear and other quality of life improvements.
This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the system that need it.
I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for many tasks, but I do wonder about touch screens. For some things, touch screens can be plenty fast and the UI adapts to the task.
I'm in the distribution/manufacturing ERP vertical in the US for SMB clients... yes we see it. No - not often
Most people are running on 90s-2000s era stuff rather than TUIs.
For the most part, it works well, and is not very costly.
Check out Sage100... flexible, cheap, on prem... runs everything from job / work tickets to inventory, purchasing, financials, payroll, etc.
Aint sexy but it works!
Nice - thank you!
Does linux count? 99% of linux use-cases don't include xwindows.
They are managed via terminal probably, but only few cases the business application runs as TUI.
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.
Was it Dynix by chance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_%28software%29
I struggle to remember myself... but I found this earlier today:
"The years of 1995 and 1996 brought many technological improvements to the Library including the addition of InfoTrac SearchBank, a computerized magazine and newspaper index; ADVANCE, a new Unix-based online library catalog; public access to the Internet with terminals at all library locations;"
ADVANCE: https://librarytechnology.org/document/4772
InfoTrac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoTrac
I manage the roomaccess of my workshop via a custom TUI application . Works flawlessly.
this should video of the use of IBM CallPath on an AS/400 should get you all misty-eyed https://youtu.be/5pY6Xxptp9A?t=2058
This is absolutely impossible in the EU where law is changed 100x times per day. You simply wouldn't comply.