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Comment by philiplu

6 days ago

Sorry, but this 65 yo grey-beard disagrees. A TUI to me, back in the 80s/90s, was something that ran in the terminal and was almost always ncurses-based. This was back when I was still using ADM-3A serial terminals, none of that new-fangled PCs stuff.

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philiplu

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bombcar  6 days ago

Exactly. A CLI is a single line - like edlin. A TUI takes over all or most of the screen, like edit or vi or emacs.

Norton Commander (or Midnight Commander) is probably the quintessential example of a powerful TUI; it can do things that would be quite hard to replicate as easily in a CLI.

KPGv2  6 days ago

We might've been caught on different parts of the wave. I checked Ngrams out of curiosity

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TUI&year_start...

Basically it was never used, then it was heavily used, and then never used, and then in the early 00s it took off again.

That'd explain why you used it, I never did, and now young kids are.

  • marssaxman  6 days ago

    Thanks for looking that up! It makes sense, of course - the line starts to drop in 1984, with the release of the Macintosh, and hits a trough around the launch of Windows 95.

    It's not a term I recall hearing at all when I started using computers in the mid-'80s - all that mattered back then was "shiny new GUI, or the clunky old thing?" I really thought it was a retroneologism when I first heard it, maybe twenty years ago.

  • rjmunro  6 days ago

    I don't think that search is very valid - the TUI group travel companies are likely much more mentioned than Terminal User Interface. They are pretty big around the world and have an airline, cruises, hotels etc.