[TUHS] Re: Was curses ported to Seventh Edition Unix?

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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Hi Jonathan & Doug,

At 2024-05-25T20:48:54+1000, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> 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 ;-) ]
> 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:
> 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.

> 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.

> 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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