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QuickBASIC or even Visual Basic 1 immediately come to mind. They have good, discoverable navigation and documentation.

I have no idea where you'd be able to find it since it's a proprietary product but InfoLease 9 had one of my favorites TUIs from a long gone era. You could navigate through and edit complicated contract information extremely quickly through a series of fixed number based menus and views. Once I got the hang of it I could blaze through entering tons and tons of data without any effort. I suppose a lot of BBSes had a kind-of similar interface but without the field validation and documentation (you could write ? virtually anywhere to get quick documentation about what you were editing or what something was intended for, and fields were validated in this really "perfect" way where it never felt like you lost time if you fat-fingered something).



QuickBASIC's modernity was just popping out of those 80x25 character cells. It was as promising of the future as Windows 95.


Visual Basic for DOS is AWESOME. I briefly used it last year to make a Wordle clone for Dos.

The 3D buttons in a TUI, event-based programming in DOS, the rich help system… just awesome.


An interface that UI designers of today should pay closer attention to. Same for Delphi in GUI land.




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