Was curses ported to Seventh Edition Unix? - TUHS

Clem Cole

25 May 25 May

6:46 a.m.

I’m traveling this weekend so I’m doing this by memory. ISTR The original curses was developed on Ing70 as part of Rogue and that It missed the 2BSD tape by about a year. See if you can find an early Rogue distribution and I think you’ll find it there. If not look in the early net news source distributions. Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 8:04 PM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Hi folks, I'm finding it difficult to find any direct sources on the question in the subject line. Does anyone here have any source material they can point me to documenting the existence of a port of BSD curses to Unix Version 7? I know that curses made it into 2.9BSD for the PDP-11, but that's not quite the same thing. There are comments in System V Release 2's curses.h file[1][2] (very different from 4BSD's[3]) that suggest some effort to accommodate Version 7's terminal driver. So I would _presume_ that curses got ported to Version 7. But that's System V, right when it started diverging from BSD curses, and moreover, presumption is not evidence. Even personal accounts/anecdotes would be helpful. Maybe some of you _wrote_ curses applications for Version 7 machines. Regards, Branden [1] System III apparently did not have curses at all. Both it and 4BSD were released in 1980. System V Release 1 doesn't seem to, either. [2] https://github.com/ryanwoodsmall/oldsysv/blob/master/sysvr2-vax/include/cur… [3] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4BSD/usr/include/curses.h

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Jonathan Gray

4:48 p.m.

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 07:03:48PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

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Hi folks, I'm finding it difficult to find any direct sources on the question in the subject line. Does anyone here have any source material they can point me to documenting the existence of a port of BSD curses to Unix Version 7?

"In particular, the C shell, curses, termcap, vi and job control were ported back to Version 7 (and later System III) so that it was not unusual to find these features on otherwise pure Bell releases." from Documentation/Books/Life_with_Unix_v2.pdf in some v7ish distributions: unisoft, xenix, nu machine, venix? https://bitsavers.org/pdf/codata/Unisoft_UNIX_Vol_1_Aug82.pdf pg 437 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_codataUnis_28082791/page/n435/mode/2up https://bitsavers.org/pdf/forwardTechnology/xenix/Xenix_System_Volume_2_Sof… pg 580 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_forwardTecstemVolume2SoftwareDevelopm… https://bitsavers.org/pdf/lmi/LMI_Docs/UNIX_1.pdf pg 412 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_lmiLMIDocs_20873181/page/n411/mode/2up

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Clem Cole

6:16 p.m.

Oh how I hate history rewrites. Job control was developed by Kulp on V7 in Europe and MIT. Joy saw it and added it what would become 4BSD. The others were all developed on V7 (PDP11)at UCB. They were not back ported either. The vax work inherited them from V7. It is true, The public tended to see these as 4BSD features as that was the vehicle that got larger distribution. Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 6:49 AM Jonathan Gray <jsg(a)jsg.id.au> wrote:

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On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 07:03:48PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

Hi folks, I'm finding it difficult to find any direct sources on the question in the subject line. Does anyone here have any source material they can point me to documenting the existence of a port of BSD curses to Unix Version 7?

"In particular, the C shell, curses, termcap, vi and job control were ported back to Version 7 (and later System III) so that it was not unusual to find these features on otherwise pure Bell releases." from Documentation/Books/Life_with_Unix_v2.pdf in some v7ish distributions: unisoft, xenix, nu machine, venix? https://bitsavers.org/pdf/codata/Unisoft_UNIX_Vol_1_Aug82.pdf pg 437 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_codataUnis_28082791/page/n435/mode/2up https://bitsavers.org/pdf/forwardTechnology/xenix/Xenix_System_Volume_2_Sof… pg 580 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_forwardTecstemVolume2SoftwareDevelopm… https://bitsavers.org/pdf/lmi/LMI_Docs/UNIX_1.pdf pg 412 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_lmiLMIDocs_20873181/page/n411/mode/2up

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G. Branden Robinson

25 May 25 May

9:28 p.m.

Hi Jonathan & Doug, At 2024-05-25T20:48:54+1000, Jonathan Gray wrote:

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On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 07:03:48PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

Does anyone here have any source material they can point me to documenting the existence of a port of BSD curses to Unix Version 7?

"In particular, the C shell, curses, termcap, vi and

[ snip per Clem Cole ;-) ]

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were ported back to Version 7 (and later System III) so that it was not unusual to find these features on otherwise pure Bell releases." from Documentation/Books/Life_with_Unix_v2.pdf

Thanks! This is exactly the sort of source citation I was looking for. At 2024-05-25T11:06:24-0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote:

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Curses appears in the v8 manual but not v7. Of course a conclusion that it was not ported to v7 turns on dates.

I was confident that curses was not "part" of v7 because of these factors. (1) It wasn't in the manual; (2) archives of v7 in which we now traffic as historical artifacts show no trace of it; and (3) the story of its origin and development, even when distorted, doesn't place it at the CSRC as far back as 1977/8. But, if someone placed to know had claimed that it was, that would have been a claim worth investigating.

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Does v7 refer to a point in time or an interval that extended until we undertook to prepare the v8 manual? Obviously curses was ported during or before that interval.

Perhaps one reason my question can be read two ways is that I'm interested in both aspects of the issue. I'm trying to write a "History" section for the primary ncurses man page and clean up other problems its documentation has, like a boilerplate reference to "Version 7 curses" in many of its other man pages, which repeatedly implies such a thing as a separate line of development from "BSD curses" and "System V curses". I've been dubious of that language since first encountering it, but I want a good documentary record to support my proposal to chop it out.

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If curses was available when the v7 manual was prepared, I (who edited both editions) evidently was unaware of any dependence on it then.

I see no evidence that you missed it. :) Regards, Branden

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