A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo
Summary
Nicolas Seriot demonstrates that ncurses terminfo expansions form a small, stateful programming language capable of simulating a two-counter Minsky machine. The article walks through theory, a practical adding machine, a Fibonacci machine, and a clocked variant using top, and discusses security implications of running terminfo code inside other processes. It emphasizes the universality of the approach and the interplay between terminal capabilities and computation.