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- 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.
by mrngm - 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.
by privong - 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. ]]
by OhMeadhbh - 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.
by perlgeek - 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:
by jamal-kumar - 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 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!
by arichard123 - 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.