The pcurses library was further improved when Zeyd Ben-Halim took over the development effort in late 1991.[2][3][4] The new library was released as ncurses in November 1993, with version 1.8.1 as the first major release. Subsequent work, through version 1.8.8 ( M1995), was driven by Eric S. Raymond, who added the form and menu libraries written by Juergen Pfeifer.[5] Since 1996, it has been maintained by Thomas E. Dickey.[3]