[TUHS] Where/when did TUIs come from

[Greg A. Woods]

At Mon, 9 Jun 2025 10:57:05 -0700, Adam Koszek <adam at koszek.com> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Where/when did TUIs come from
>
> Question: where did TUIs come from originally, and what were their
> earliest instances?

By "TUI", I assume you mean that in the anachronistic sense going
backwards from "GUI".  (Technically command-line interfaces are "text
UIs" too, but just using one line at a time!)

So "TUI" is really "full-screen text-based user interface"?

I would think any terminal "block oriented" terminal, including all the
way back to the IBM 2260 (1964), were typically used to create
"full-screen textual user interfaces", while character-oriented
terminals, including printing terminals, were typically used to create
command-line interfaces (at least until screen-oriented terminals
supported faster baud rates).

I would also think the first full-screen editors (on any system,
including with any kind of character-oriented terminals) should arguably
be described as "TUIs" (as opposed to line-oriented editors and other
command-line interfaces).

In the Unix world I think there were versions of full-screen editors
well before "vi" was fully fledged.  I used one called "fred -- the
friendly editor", initially IIRC on a PDP 11/60 running 7th Edition Unix
at the University of Calgary, though at the time it was contemporary
with "vi" (1980).  It was, I believe, basically also an adaptation of
Unix "ed".  It had a modeless "open mode" controlled by the cursor keys
allow one to move about and change text at arbitrary locations on the
screen, though it could also be used in a more line-oriented way like
you would expect a full-screen "ed" to work -- in this mode it still
maintained a full screen's worth of context and one could "page" up and
down in the document being edited but typically one inserted/appended
lines in a modal manner, or moved or deleted or ran other commands on a
line or block of lines at a time.

Unfortunately I've never seen or heard any more of "fred" since leaving
UofC in the early 1980s.  It may even have been a local name for some
adaptation of another editor, perhaps even "em" itself.

In second year I quickly quit using "fred" and switched to (Gosling)
emacs (true full-time modeless operation, finally!) as soon as it was
available on the new VAX 11/780 (then running 4BSD -- though in first
year it initially ran 32V then 3BSD).

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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