[TUHS] the history of termcap (was: Re: Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C)

[G. Branden Robinson via TUHS]

Hi Clem,

Splitting off one topic here...

At 2026-05-20T21:23:47-0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> The point is, as late as the development of Research Seventh Edition,
> the use of a "glass tty" was less common within the Bell System, while
> the Universities had already started to switch, and at many places
> (certainly my experience at CMU and USB) had already switched nearly
> 100%.   But that was the problem.  Most "video" editors like Cornell's
> Fred (friendly ed) or the Rand Editor were hard-coded for specific
> terminals.  Joy's termcap was a huge (and practical) solution to an
> issue that was felt outside the Bell System before it was really
> needed inside it.

I think this account might be positioning Joy such that he eclipses the
contributions of others.  Here's the history of the termcap library in
the relevant ncurses man page nowadays.

HISTORY
     Bill Joy originated a forerunner of termcap called “ttycap”, dated
     September 1977, and released in 1BSD (March 1978).  It used many of
     the same function names as the later termcap, such as tgetent,
     tgetflag, tgetnum, and tgetstr.

     A clear descendant, the termlib library, followed in 2BSD (May
     1979), adding tgoto and tputs.  The former applied at that time
     only to cursor positioning capabilities, thus the overly specific
     name.  Little changed in 3BSD (late 1979) except the addition of
     test programs and a termlib man page, which documented the API
     shown in section “SYNOPSIS” above.

     4BSD (November 1980) renamed termlib to termcap and added another
     test program.  The library remained much the same through 4.3BSD
     (June 1986).  4.4BSD‐Lite (June 1994) refactored it, leaving the
     API unchanged.
...

Full disclosure: I've worked on that very content--with Thomas Dickey,
of course.  If there are incorrect claims, I'm keen to get them fixed.

Regards,
Branden
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20260520/ac36f971/attachment.sig>