A Brief History of Curses
Historically, the first ancestor of curses was the routines written to
- provide screen-handling for the vi editor; these used the
- already-existing termcap database facility for describing terminal
+ provide screen-handling for the vi editor; these used the termcap
+ database facility (both released in 3BSD) for describing terminal
capabilities. These routines were abstracted into a documented library
and first released with the early BSD UNIX versions. All of this work
- was done by students at the University of California.
+ was done by students at the University of California (Berkeley
+ campus). The curses library was first published in 4.0BSD, a year
+ after 3BSD (i.e., late 1980).
After graduation, one of those students went to work at AT&T Bell
Labs, and made an improved termcap library called terminfo (i.e.,
- "libterm"). That was subsequently released in System V Release 2.
- Thereafter, other developers added to the terminfo library. For
+ "libterm"), and adapted the curses library to use this. That was
+ subsequently released in System V Release 2 (early 1984). Thereafter,
+ other developers added to the curses and terminfo libraries. For
instance, a student at Cornell University wrote an improved terminfo
library as well as a tool (tic) to compile the terminal descriptions.
As a general rule, AT&T did not identify the developers in the
exceptions.
System V Release 3 (System III UNIX) from Bell Labs featured a
- rewritten and much-improved curses library,l along with the tic
- program.
+ rewritten and much-improved curses library, along with the tic program
+ (late 1986).
To recap, terminfo is based on Berkeley's termcap database, but
contains a number of improvements and extensions. Parameterized
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