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Comment by gr33nq | Hacker News Reader

We still work with an AS/400 (IBM iSeries) on a daily basis for legacy data, and it's impressive to watch how quickly our older staff members navigate the interface and get work done with it. It's several orders of magnitude faster than our newer web-based ERP, and I don't think I can be convinced that any modern browser UI will ever match the efficiencies offered by a terminal-based interface. That's not to discount the numerous technical benefits you reap by moving to a modern software stack, but strictly from an end-user usability standpoint, the AS/400 still wins in my book.

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> I don't think I can be convinced that any modern browser UI will ever match the efficiencies offered by a terminal-based interface.

But you can run a terminal in the browser. It’s a pretty common way to interact with cloud servers. And as long as the server isn’t on the other side of the planet it’s not noticeably slower than a local terminal.

The problem isn’t the technology, its the sad state of UI engineering.

It's comparing apples with oranges. Your typical web based UI is layers and layers of rasterized graphics, meanwhile a terminal is the frontend for a platforms serial console.

I'm sure you can emulate the same performance in a modern webbrowser, it's just that no one cares, because no system administrator relies solely on web interfaces to get work done.

>> no system administrator relies solely on web interfaces to get work done

Increasingly, they do. And prefer to, because if it's in a browser, it's probably someone else's cloud system that they don't have to administer.

How is that different from a veteran Linux programmers/sysadmin skilled in $whatever shell and language of choice?

Our staff can run our ERP on a browser on a phone at the airport. I imagine it's hard to get 5250 on an iPhone. =D

Here you go, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tn5250/id284741179

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