Curses!!
summary
Starts at telegraph hardware and traces the lineage to video terminals, showing concrete artifacts and numbers: a 1956 Whirlwind hookup of teletypewriters, machines with 5000 vacuum tubes running ~20 kHz and crashing every 20 minutes, ASCII’s 33 control codes with terminals already using 18, and the escape sequences that let programs move the cursor and color text. Demonstrates using the terminfo database (over 2,500 entries), notes mouse capabilities aren’t in terminfo, and links to JavaScript code that implements ncurses‑like behavior and the actual escape strings used (e.g., clear screen = ESC[H ESC[2J).
AI-written summary · about
