On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Michael Kjörling wrote:

> On 27 Oct 2019 21:11 -0400, from usotsuki@buric.co (Steve Nickolas):
>>
>> I can't imagine there's any such connection.  MS-DOS got it from CP/M, which
>> didn't even have the concept of subdirectories until after MS-DOS did.
>
> If there was such a relationship, it would probably make more sense
> for the command prompt termination character to be ":", not ">", as
> DOS labelled devices as [whatever]: (like "A:" or "NUL:"). So I agree
> with Steve; I imagine it's unrelated. They just had to use _something_
> as a default to indicate that the computer is waiting for a command,
> and ">" is as good a character as any.

86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character.  This was changed for 
IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0.

-uso.