PDCurses

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.

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.