Well, if you would be using Turbo Vision, then there was mouse, callbacks, events, the whole stuff. And async would just be a couple of chained interrupts.
I also used CA-Clipper, Summer '87 and the OOP variants 5.x.
Most of the stuff did use a mouse and some TUI navigation, with menus and stuff, we had a couple of libraries for it.
I had a pascal turbo vision accounts app. The client decided to share the data between two machines over a 10baseT network. With the exception of an occasional, but fully recoverable write issue (the user just had to retry their last save operation), I didn't have to lift a finger to get it past y2k. Mouse, printer (serial and parallel) were no problems. Good times.
Yeah I used to look longingly at Turbo Vision GUIs, but C++ was scary at the time. Do you think building TUIs with TV was qualitatively better than approaches popular today? Any insights why?
As for building TUIs not really, other than the usual Clipper entry forms.
For example, when I moved from Turbo Vision (MS-DOS) into Object Windows Library (Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5) I did not regret it.
One thing I do conceed, a full keyboard experience is much better for data entry forms and on GUIs the mouse is given too much focus, although the same approach could be easily implemented as on TUIs.
I also used CA-Clipper, Summer '87 and the OOP variants 5.x.
Most of the stuff did use a mouse and some TUI navigation, with menus and stuff, we had a couple of libraries for it.
Now doing those forms it was pretty neat.