[TUHS] Re: Where/when did TUIs come from

Besides all the curses and termcap/terminfo efforts, There was also POP which stood for Pieces of Perspect. It was a terminal screen update library. I think it used curses as the underlying CRT management package. Sorry, i dont recall the authors. It was on one of the distribution tapes around the late 1970s, early 80s. I remember it being painfully slow on my PDP 11/70. It would redraw the entire screen with every change. I sped it up using differential compute buffers so only actual changes were refreshed. I used it for my two player Tank War game and a new email program I called Mr. ZIP. Mr. Zip had three display zones or display panels. One for email actions. One for a list of emails and a email contents zone for displaying the text of the selected email. Part of the work I did hacking the kernel, utilities and applications at NJSMU so I could support 250 users connected via serial to the PDP 11/70 used to run that insurance company. Massive 4 MB of National Semiconductor Ram, The maximum memory for that machine. In those days of Tape based distribution, My boss was not keen to engage in "software distribution". More out of fear of running afoul of AT&T lawyers, I think than anything else. So releasing source code was forbidden. Otherwise, POP might have taken off with my performance improvements. You would have all been enthralled by Tank War and got no real work done. You had to enter several of your moves ahead of time. (Command buffering) So you really had to think strategically to out maneuver your opponent. On Mon, Jun 9, 2025, 1:57 PM Adam Koszek <adam(a)koszek.com> wrote: