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.
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.
>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.
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.
Ehh what. I would give some merit to arguments like "no one should use lodash in 2025 because you can do most of it with built-ins nowadays" or maybe because it doesn't tree-shake well or maybe even because it doesn't seem to have much active development now.
But stating matter-of-factly that no one should use it because some of its well-documented functions are mutating ones and not functional-style, and should instead use one particular FP library out of the many out there, is not very cool.
I was having roughly the same thought.
I thought to myself, this is something my son would produce, and I'd be super proud, and see through the 90's/Yahoo-ish style.
Brushing, flossing, and mouthwash doesn't kill all of the bacteria in your mouth. Your entire mouth is coated with a biofilm... and after cleaning, your mouth gets recolonized by bacteria from between your teeth, beneath the gums, plaque, and other small crevices in your mouth.
Probably, but the difference I see is that single application of this product is enough (as opposed to buying mouthwash and other stuff that's often discussed here like toothpaste with Novamin for the rest of your life).
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.