[COFF] Comparative promptology

[tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo)]

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Harald Arnesen <skogtun at gmail.com> writes:

> Harald Arnesen [29.10.2019 11:30]:
>> Warner Losh [28.10.2019 20:57]:
>> 
>>> "@  " was the TOPS-20 prompt.
>> 
>> Also the Sintran (Norsk Data) prompt.
>
> btw, we used to call it "grisehale" ("pig's tail").

Not at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (now part of the Norwegian
University of Technology and Science).  There, it was called "nabla",
because of the EXEC 8 operating system on UNIVAC mainframes, which used
the FIELDATA character set, and where the "Master Space" character,
(visually represented by nabla, which looks like an upside-down capital
delta: '∇' if what you're reading this text on supports Unicode) was
used as a prefix character indicating an operating system command.  It
was mapped to ASCII 64 externally, a natural choice, because FIELDATA
had no @, ASCII had no nabla -- and Master Space was encoded as decimal
64 in FIELDATA already.

The name stuck, and @ kept being called nabla at least until 1990.

-tih
-- 
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