High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The "N" in ncurses is an abbreviation of the word "new." This is because ncurses is a free software emulation (clone) of System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses, an enhancement over the discontinued classic 4.4 BSD curses. The XSI Curses standard issued by X/Open is explicitly and closely modeled on System V. Development started in 1991 or 1992 using pcurses and was fi ...Full description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The "N" in ncurses is an abbreviation of the word "new." This is because ncurses is a free software emulation (clone) of System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses, an enhancement over the discontinued classic 4.4 BSD curses. The XSI Curses standard issued by X/Open is explicitly and closely modeled on System V. Development started in 1991 or 1992 using pcurses and was first announced in 1993 as noted on the ncurses homepage. An earlier article refers to 1991 (second-hand information) but contains several flaws, e.g., asserting that pcurses was little known (it was distributed in the first volume of the comp.sources.unix newsgroup as noted in the terminfo article) and obscuring the connection between BSD and Unix curses via Mark Horton. The README file in ncurses 1.8.1 states "v0.1 July 31, 1992" and "v1.8.1 Nov 5, 1993", which agrees with the current NEWS file. The ncurses NEWS file gives detailed development information.