I think it counts! I was suspecting TUIs were either an IBM thing or UNIX thing—not sure if it’s < 1970 direction or > 1970 direction. In UNIX, someone must have added code for the cursor addressing for CRT screens b/c on printer terminals moving back a page … wasn’t possible?

Adam

On Jun 9, 2025, at 11:21 AM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:14, Adam Koszek <adam@koszek.com> wrote:

Hi,

I got interested in UI design and often study some historical aspects of it as I work on software. It’s hard not to notice how fast/usable Text User Interfaces are—ncurses and its siblings are still alive and well. From the ergonomy point of view, not needing a mouse in those interfaces if perfect. 

Question: where did TUIs come from originally, and what were their earliest instances?

Many pages state that Vi was the first, but I’ve been looking through some old hardware photos, and things capable of more sophisticated interactions existed before Vi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen

Some terminals with block display:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270

^ ’71. Wiki says Vi showed up in ’76, but I suspect IBM mainframes may have had TUIs before.

Question 2: were there any manuals talking about TUIs? I’m thinking some of those spiffy IBM things mandating certain design.

Does this count?  I was just looking at it the other day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Editing_System

I have a feeling we're going to get away from UNIX pretty quickly here.

-Henry