Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchell_h | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Was not a TUI, but was totally controllable from the keyboard. There was no mouse or touch screen, you could get pretty fast at it. You are also correct about the tax exempt thing, the customers who used it often knew what to ask for. The new registers now have a completely different UI with a touch screen. Seems like a step backwards.

Giving someone a sequence of keypresses as instructions rather than a series of obscure buttons and submenus to navigate is so much better. The VI/VIM cultists have been wise to this for over 30 years yet we insist on creating terrible mini-pc's running bloated windows to hark up a hodge-podge of WinForms or whatever proprietary corpo-slop is most friendly for the non-software engineer engineering manager and project lead

>He mentioned the process for tax exempt purchases was a bit challenging/not the most common.

I wonder if that's why Target does not support making sales tax-free purchases (for resellers, nonprofits, etc.) online? Amazon and Walmart do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com