Re: For everybody...
"Curses and termcap has been around since BSD 2.3 or thereabouts in the late 1970's or early 1980's."
Bill Joy invented termcap using what would become 1BSD in '77-'78, where I first came into contact with it. Many other people also added it to their bag of tricks as they heard about it through the grapevine. It first shipped as an "official" part of the OS on 2BSD, in May of '79. It wasn't perfect (still isn't), but did you ever try to use ttycap?
I don't have an exact date for Ken Arnold's curses, the earliest source I can find here locally is unversioned (!!), and claims to be from early 1981. Odd fact for collectors of UNIX trivia: Many people think vi was written to take advantage of Curses. The reality is that Arnold used vi's internal routines as the basis when he wrote Curses.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
