curses (was: printf, data presentation)

Doug Gwyn gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL
Mon Jan 9 14:10:06 AEST 1989


In article <6896 at june.cs.washington.edu> ka at june.cs.washington.edu (Kenneth Almquist) writes:
>Well, my memory is pretty fuzzy here, but I was under the impression that
>AT&T had nothing to do with the original development of the terminfo version
>of curses, although Mark Horton did a lot of work on it after AT&T picked
>up the code.  I recall that the code was copyrighted by Pavel Curtis (or
>some such person), and if it had been developed by AT&T then AT&T or Bell
>Labs would be the owner of the copyright.  Anyone know for sure?

Yes, I was peripherally involved with this.  The original termcap-based
curses was developed at Berkeley, and when Mark Horton took a job with
Bell Labs, he developed terminfo as an improved version of termcap, and
adapted curses to work with terminfo.  The current UNIX System V curses
evolved from that, and has been substantially reworked by several people.

Pavel Curtis, desiring to provide terminfo without AT&T licensing,
developed an independent implementation, working just from the specs.
Neither AT&T's nor Pavel's versions are based on the other's code.



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