Purely historic question: VT200 text graphic programming

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2011-03-10 at 00:38 -0600, GrayShark wrote: 
> Once, many, many, years ago, I programmed some type of 'graphical' 
> interface on a VT200 terminal (only DEC VAX/VMS programmers are going to 
> know what this is). Question. What was the library I linked against?
> Yes, you remember, painting boxes with ascii and the superset of ascii. 

It was curses [ these days people typically use "ncurses" ].  There
really isn't anything historic about it, it is used in many current
projects/products - basically anything that will run in a gnome-terminal
[such as YaST] uses ncurses.  It works very well from Python.  [for
example:
http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/2010/01/python-curses-in-action-even-on-aix.html ]
There are several higher level 'wrappers' for ncurses these days.

Docs @ <http://docs.python.org/howto/curses.html>