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

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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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 <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Ken was working in Ing70 [he was part of the Ingres group] - IngVax did
> not yet exist,
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>
> On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 11:57 AM G. Branden Robinson <
> g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Clem,
>>
>> At 2024-05-25T11:40:13-0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>> > It was never needed to be ported -- it was developed on V7.
>> > It was released in comp.sources.unix volume1 as pcurses
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> > That said, I believe late volumes have nervous updates.
>>
>> 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
>>
>

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