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

karma+

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is absolutely impossible in the EU where law is changed 100x times per day. You simply wouldn't comply.

Huge swathes of business software run on stuff built in the 80s and 90s with only incremental changes since.

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.

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.

Textbook example of a piece of software being a shark (perfectly adapted over millennia to being a perfect predator) not a dinosaur (obsolete/extinct).

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.

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 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.

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 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.

Leroy Merlin (French multinational retail company, home improvement and gardening products) still runs these systems at the PoS, at least in Spain.

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.).

> 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.

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.

Count your blessings.

And if anyone suggests rewriting it, fire them.

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.

Interesting. What sort of database are they running and what is the frontend? Dbase? Foxpro? Turbo Pascal with BDE?

Does linux count? 99% of linux use-cases don't include xwindows.

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!

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/...

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...

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 used today. Very unique building, there was a floor between floors you could only get to via the warehouse. It made for an unnaturally long stairwell.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

When i checkout at costco i see their TUI and im so curious about it.

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.

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 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

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...

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.

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. ]]

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 (mostly IHG properties). You got a pay raise if you learned MARSHA.

IIRC it 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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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 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 can fly around in it.

That’s what’s so efficient about TUIs for local software. You typically can’t do that in web apps. Not that it’s impossible, but it’s far from the default.

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.

[delayed]

Any good guides to building TUIs in 2025?

Ah I am still running such a thing: a wonderful piece of software I wrote in the 90s w/ FoxBase.

But here’s the nice thing: I converted everything in a Flask app with React frontend.

The nicest thing is that besides using a modern relational DB, I write everything to keep old db files synced so that I can still run the old app in DosBox…and keep the new stuff in Docker.

It works, flawlessly:-)

Microcenter does this too. When you are in the checkout you can see the cashier using a DOS interface to ring up the items.

IBM IMS - fast until abend :)

what if your entire business was on a TUI? terminal.shop be like

Worked for a car insurance firm about a decade ago and the whole business ran on their Big Iron. I joined the company to work on a customer facing web UI that hooked into an API layer the server group developed to pull data from the Db2.

The callcentre however still used the TUI for all customer inquiries; it was only the customers who got a pretty interface to view their details.

Depending on which system you were logged into, you had a green screen (production) or magenta (development).

TCL and Expect would shine there. Even JimTCL could do it once built against WIndows XP with Min-C:

https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl

https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html

My first programming "job" was a sort of summer internship when I was 14 for a family owned company called Signature Systems (signature.net). They are still in business. Their product is an operating system called Comet, that if I'm not mistaken was originally a compatibility play bringing software from the previous era of 16 bit microcomputers onto DOS PCs, and then later into Windows. I may be misremembering some of the details but I think at one point a Comet system ran ticket sales at Madison Square Gardens. My summer project was to build a demo using their new support for Windows GUI elements. The last time I spoke with the owners, they told me that they still had customers, including in the textiles industry where loom patterns had been coded in Basic. I often think about it as an example of a legacy system, and smile at the idea of someone thinking they need to rewrite their plaid weave in TypeScript or Rust.

Separately, I have spent the last three years building a web app that replaced a heap of automation scripts for a ~50 person business. These were much more modern than what the OP describes but it had some of the same qualities. The scripts mostly generated google sheets and emails. The replacement is a python web app using SQLite. Moving the company data into a proper database has been a very significant step for them. In some ways, the project feels a lot like custom business software that got built in the 90s.

Prediction: there will be a huge demand for apps that have at least a baseline of functionality that is TUI enabled, preferably feature complete.

Why? Token cost. He’ll of a lot cheaper to use an LLM than a vision model for something like automating apps, or enabling your app to be agent-friendly at a low cost.

Costco still uses a TUI in its stores that looks like it runs on DOS.