Multi-threaded console apps

What's the best way to do something like an IRC client where there's messages coming from the network you'll want to display without interrupting the user's input.

I'm using a toy language (MzScheme), so I don't have easy access to some curses library or ptys or anything like that...

Any ideas, or should I just give up and write a curses wrapper?  Can GNU Readline do anything like this?

>>18
bits and shit
What is that?
Well, first I have to decompress the Huffman-compressed packets I receive, then I have to find the correct bytes in the packets and flip the byte order (but not in all cases).

As for the input issue... it seems readline can do this somehow, but it'll require some hacking, at least creating a custom output port I think.

http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC35