Things to Know About GNU Readline
> Ramey told me via email that Readline, far from being an original idea, was created to implement functionality prescribed by the POSIX specification, which in the late 1980s had just been created.This actually isn't true.  The POSIX shell spec (1003 IIRC) was published in 1992.  The headline library was in the first bash release; Brian might have written it before starting on bash.  The inspiration was the TOPS-20 input JSYS (system call) mixed in with Emacs.How do I know?  Well you can ask Brian; as he reminded me it came from design discussions for bash I had with him on this very topic at the time, specifically that interactive text input should be a library.