From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 09:19:20 +0100 Subject: [COFF] Comparative promptology In-Reply-To: (Harald Arnesen's message of "Tue, 29 Oct 2019 11:32:29 +0100") References: <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <51f2d838-d097-a93f-b44d-9c670d206d2b@tnetconsulting.net> <7wsgnc4rfd.fsf_-_@junk.nocrew.org> <578c584e-0296-957f-955a-ccab0697560a@gmail.com> Message-ID: Harald Arnesen 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 -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay