16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
8:40 p.m.
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 2:03 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
No, Bill Joy did vi. Ken Arnold did curses. The vi
code did all it's
stuff directly with the termlib library calls.
Both of those statements are true. But the other truth is that Ken took
the code from vi to create the original curses library.
You are correct, vi did not use curses as a library. It was hard coded.
Similarly, termcap started out the same way. In fact, I know Cornell's
fred and I thought a number of other early Unix screen editors like the
original Rand e, were hardcoded for specific terminals (I personally put
the code for the Lsi and Fox into Fred which was what we mostly had at
CMU). As UCB got more and more different displays, the routines for
terminal control also got pulled out and put into a separate library. Mary
Ann eventually became the main person behind it and I'll let her add the
details of who did what (I'm under the impression, wnj did the first cut of
termlib and then Mary Ann overhauled it).