November 5, 2025
Green screens, red-hot takes
Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
1993 text screens run a family biz — commenters say big stores do this too
TLDR: A family business still runs on a 1993 text-only system, supercharged by an old Windows XP box. Commenters piled on with examples from big retail and insurance, splitting between fans of fast old-school screens and calls to modernize—suggesting humble text systems quietly power more than you think.
A software engineer stepped back into the family wholesale shop and found the same text-only system from 1993 still running everything—orders, invoices, even finances. The kicker? An ancient Windows XP box still does auto-data entry, earning meme status as the nuclear-winter PC. After a quick upgrade to Python, the post asked: who else is living the green-screen life? The comments roared: apparently, a lot. One user said front-desk staff at rental counters could fly through text screens faster than any mouse, while others claimed big chains like Lowe’s and Home Depot are still doing point-of-sale (cash register) work in text mode. Farm equipment shops (John Deere and Kubota) and old-school insurance systems also got name-checked. Someone dropped a retro bomb: an Atari ST still runs a campground. The drama? It’s a split-screen showdown: speed demons who swear text UIs (TUI = text-based user interface) make them superhuman versus skeptics whispering “time bomb” and asking about databases—“DBase? FoxPro? Turbo Pascal?” Meanwhile, a Linux fan burned down the whole debate with: text mode is normal, deal with it. Nostalgia vs modernization, the comments delivered both laughs and receipts, with Epicor/ADP’s legacy system getting unlikely hero status.
Key Points
- •A wholesale distribution family business has run its core operations on a TUI application on an on-prem Unix system since 1993.
- •Early automations were built with Microsoft Access, VBA, and SendKeys and still run on a Windows XP machine, saving significant time despite brittleness.
- •The author recently modernized many of these scripts using Python and telnetlib3, adding robust error handling.
- •Training new users on the TUI is challenging, but experienced users are highly efficient within the system.
- •The system’s lineage includes ADP (original vendor), names like D2K and Prophet 21, and current ownership by Epicor (previously Activant).