I don't know the answer, just asking the question: Is/Was curses available at the time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_%28programming_library%...

I only remember conio at the time, but without internet you just used what Microsoft gave you. The BBSes I used may have had it, but it's hard to use something if you don't know it exists.

It does look like there is a recent port: https://github.com/wmcbrine/PDCurses

So my guess is curses was not available to DOS at the time, only Unix systems.

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kragen 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm guessing that PC-Hack 1.0, the ancestor of Nethack, contains a fair subset of curses, and pdcurses is from 01987 according to the bottom of https://github.com/wmcbrine/PDCurses/blob/master/docs/HISTOR.... But on the IBM, curses mostly solved the problem of porting Unix software to MS-DOS. The problems it solved on Unix, like minimizing characters transmitted to the terminal, papering over differences between terminal types, and setting cbreak mode, just didn't exist.

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pjmlp 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of us coding at the time only cared about Turbo Vision, starting with Turbo Pascal 6. and Turbo C++ 3.0.

Or the other variant being TUI libraries for Clipper.

By 1994, most folks on PC were already doing Windows 3.x, and only using MS-DOS for games.

I only got to learn about curses years later.

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anthk 3 days ago | parent [-]

>in 1994? You wish. Turbo C++/Pascal was widely used under DOS, things truly began to change with WIndows 95 and even until 1997 DOS wasn't fully dead because it had very complex uses with DOS extenders. Windows 95 was an unstable piece of crap and for tons of industrial cases tons of people booted it in DOS mode to launch really advanced software. By 1994 you would even get multimedia CD's made for DOS with ease.

	▲	pjmlp 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I am a 70's child that started coding in 1986. By 1994, most people already had Turbo Pascal and C++ on Windows 3.x, I happen to have such boxes. Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 and Turbo Pascal 7 both supported Windows 3.x. Turbo C++ 3.1 onwards also did Windows 3.x. Industrial use cases used purpose built OSes, and unstable piece of crap applies to all 8 and 16 bit home computer OSes without MMUs.

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sedatk 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

AFAIK, curses worked with ANSI codes while conio directly accessed the screen buffer. ANSI support on DOS wasn’t enabled commonly as it needed a separate device driver, ANSI.SYS, to work, and it usually made DOS text output slower.

So, even if curses were available on DOS at the time, nobody would have preferred to use it.