l hate autocorrect ... s/nervous/numerous/ ᐧ On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 11:40 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:

Hi Clem, At 2024-05-25T11:40:13-0400, Clem Cole wrote: This bit conflicts with other accounts. Here's what I have in draft. HISTORY 4BSD (1980) introduced curses, implemented largely by Kenneth C. R. C. Arnold, who organized the terminal abstraction and screen management features of Bill Joy’s vi(1) editor into a library. That system ran only on the VAX architecture; curses saw a port to 2.9BSD (1983) for the PDP‐11. System V Release 2 (SVr2, 1984) significantly revised curses and replaced the termcap portion thereof with a different API for terminal handling, terminfo. System V added form and menu libraries in SVr3 (1987) and enhanced curses with color support in SVr3.2 later the same year. SVr4 (1989) brought the panel library. pcurses by distinction was, by the accounts I have, a later effort by Pavel Curtis to clone SVr2 curses by taking BSD curses and replacing its termcap bits with a reimplementation terminfo. This was apparently done for licensing reasons, as BSD code was free ("as in freedom") and System V certainly was not. The pcurses 0.7 tarball I have contains a document, doc/manual.tbl.ms, which starts as follows. Note the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs. .po +.5i .TL The Curses Reference Manual .AU Pavel Curtis .NH Introduction .LP Terminfo is a database describing many capabilities of over 150 different terminals. Curses is a subroutine package which presents a high level screen model to the programmer, while dealing with issues such as terminal differences and optimization of output to change one screenfull of text into another. .LP Terminfo is based on Berkeley's termcap database, but contains a number of improvements and extensions. Parameterized strings are introduced, making it possible to describe such capabilities as video attributes, and to handle far more unusual terminals than possible with termcap. .LP Curses is also based on Berkeley's curses package, with many improvements. The package makes use of the insert and delete line and character features of terminals so equipped, and determines how to optimally use these features with no help from the programmer. It allows arbitrary combinations of video attributes to be displayed, even on terminals that leave ``magic cookies'' on the screen to mark changes in attributes. I'm gathering data for another paragraph of that "History" section now. The long and short of it seems to be that: BSD curses, besides getting ported to many platforms, begat pcurses. pcurses begat PCCurses, PDCurses, and ncurses. PCCurses died. PDCurses went dormant, begat PDCursesMod, and roused from its slumber. ncurses, after a long period of erratic early administration that seemed more concerned with seizing celebrity status for its developers (one of whom was more single-minded and successful at this goal than the other) than with software development, has been maintained with a steady hand over 25 years. There also exists NetBSD curses, which wasn't developed ex nihilo but I'm not sure yet what origin it forked from. Regards, Branden

Hi Clem, At 2024-05-25T12:06:27-0400, Clem Cole wrote: That does complicate my simplistic story. Ing70 was, then, as you noted in a previous mail, an 11/70, but it _wasn't_ running Version 7 Unix, but rather something with various bits of BSD (also in active development, I reckon). Nevertheless, I venture, the first officially distributed curses was in 4BSD, a VAX-only release. But, it stands to reason that BSD curses never got far from its -11-portable roots; it must have been obvious that the library would be desired on such hosts and the CSRG came to officially support it thus in 2.9BSD 3 years later. Hmm. I'll have to chew on how to recast that economically. Thanks for all the light you're throwing on this! Regards, Branden

Hi Clem, At 2024-05-25T12:21:17-0400, Clem Cole wrote: Yes, sorry, I was hasty and sloppy. I should have qualified that "Version 7 Unix" with "pure". Though I wonder if anyone ran "pure" distributions of anything by today's standards, with our flatpaks and VM images and containers and distributions and Linux kernel "taint" flags. And, blessed be, our reproducible builds. So there is such a thing as progress. Okay. My crystal ball shows wordsmithing in my future. Acknowledged. Ah, I'd never heard the actual origin story of later 2BSD's reason for parallel development. Thanks! Back when I was first learning Unix, a mere 30 years ago, I asked a local guru why the kernel image was called "vmunix" instead of just plain "unix". I got a correct answer, but then asked why you'd keep calling it "vmunix" when no non-VM Unix was even available for the platform. Historical inertia and the long shadow of the work that became 4BSD. (Linus's decision to name his kernel's image "vmlinux" [or "vmlinuz" for those remember having those lulz] when in its case no non-VM version had ever existed anywhere, nor even been desired or conceived, struck me as an excess of continuity.) Unix geeks are conservative about the weirdest things. Regards, Branden

Ouch -- there was no licensing issue with curses or termcap. termcap and curses were written at UCB. When MaryAnn went to Columbus - there was desire to rewrite to be "compiled". That work was terminfo. AT&T >>restricted<< terminfo. Pavel (with coaching from a few of us, including me], wrote a new implementation of terminfo. When he was added it, he combined a rewrite of curses. Clem ᐧ On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 12:06 PM Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote:

Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; writes: From the utzoo Usenet archive... --start-- From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!cornell!pavel Newsgroups: net.general Title: New Curses/Terminfo Package Article-I.D.: cornell.3348 Posted: Sat Jul 10 15:10:14 1982 Received: Sun Jul 11 03:55:13 1982 At this past week's USENIX meeting, Mark Horton announced the completion of a replacement database/interface for the Berkeley 'termcap' setup. The new version is called 'terminfo' and has several advantages over termcap: - The database is compiled and therefore start-up time for programs using the package is considerably reduced, even faster than reading a single-entry termcap database. - The database is more human-readable and flexible. - Many more terminals can be supported due to the addition of several new capabilities, generalised parameter mechanisms (enabling the full use of, for example, the ANSI cursor-forward capability by allowing you to say 'move forward 35 spaces' as opposed to 'move forward' 35 times), a fully general yet efficient arithmetic mechanism which should allow the use of \any/ bizarre cursor-addressing scheme which can be computed, etc. - A \far/ better set of routines for accessing the database, requiring, for example, only a single call to read in an entire entry, making all of the terminal's capabilities fully available to the calling program. No more need for 'tgetent', 'tgetstr', etc. Conversion of existing programs from termcap to terminfo is very easy and usually consists mostly of throwing out all of the garbage needed to read and store a termcap entry. As a companion to the change to terminfo, Mark has also completed work on a re-vamped version of the Curses screen-handling library package. The new version has many, many advantages over the previous version, some of which are listed below: - New curses can use insert/delete line/character capabilities in terminals which have them, considerably speeding up many applications - It is possible to use the new curses on more than one type of terminal at once - All of the video attributes of a terminal (e.g. reverse video, boldface, blinking, etc.) can be used, in tandem if possible - New curses handles terminals like the Televideos with the so-called 'magic cookie' glitch which leaves markers on the screen for each change of video attributes - The arrow and function keys of terminals can be input just as though they were single characters, even on terminals which use multi-character sequences for these functions. The new curses does all necessary interpretation, passing back to the program only a defined constant telling which key was pressed. - There is a user-accessable scrolling region - The use of shell escapes and the csh ^Z job control feature is supported more fully - On systems which can support the notion, updates of the screen will abort if a character is typed at the keyboard, thus allowing the application to possibly avoid useless output - It should now be possible for most programs to be written very portably to run on most versions of UNIX, including System III, Berkeley UNIX, V7, Bell Labs internal UNIX, etc. This portability extends to the use of most terminal modes, such as raw mode, echoing, etc. Now for the bad news. Mark, being an employee of Bell Labs, cannot release any of his code. Estimates currently run as high as 18 months for a Bell release. Even then, nothing could be guaranteed as to its price. As a result, I have decided to do a public-domain implementation of both terminfo and the new curses. They will be compatible with Mark's versions. I have arranged for the library/database to be distributed with the next Berkeley Software Distribution, 4.2BSD, in December of this year. It will also be made available for free to any requestor. I agree with Mark when he says that terminfo is clearly superior to termcap and deserves to be made a new and lasting standard. I expect to be able to begin recruiting test sites for both curses and terminfo by the end of September. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please send them to me, not the network. Pavel Curtis {decvax,allegra,vax135,harpo,...}!cornell!pavel Pavel.Cornell@Udel-Relay --end-- -- Adam Sampson &lt;ats(a)offog.org&gt; <http://offog.org/>