On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 12:01 PM, Gilles Gravier <gilles(a)gravier.org> wrote: Be careful .. VMS 1.0 was released in the late 1970s, we had Vax serial #1 at CMU - I want to say 1976 or 77. Dave's Command Language (DCL - renamed DEC Command Language by DEC marketing) was originally part of an earlier RSX and yes used $ as the prompt. But numerous systems used $ and many of the other punctuation chars as a prompt. We'll have to ask srb, but I'm fair confident in stating VMS had no bearing on his choice of a command prompt (I'm fairly sure VMS was not release by the time he came to the Labs). I would have expected if it was taking it from another system (which is possible) it would have been on the British ones in use at Cambridge before he came to BTL. ᐧ

I too have not seen all of the messages on this thread. I always thought the $ was used for the shell prompt as a persistent reminder that time on the system costs money: As process accounting will assist in your monthly billing. Bill Corcoran On Aug 8, 2018, at 4:20 PM, Gilles Gravier <gilles@gravier.org<mailto:gilles@gravier.org>> wrote: Caveat emptor: I haven't read all the messages on this thread. :) But... I remember the VMS prompt being "$"... maybe some ancestry since VMS dates back to 1970? Gilles 2018-08-08 17:20 GMT+02:00 Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu<mailto:jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>>: Hey, if it works for you, go for it. After the Nth time I got confused as to exactly which machine I was typing to, I hacked the shell on my V6 Unix to read its prompt from ".profile". (Very clean, only one added line of code in the existing code.) Noel -- Gilles Gravier - Gilles@Gravier.org<mailto:Gilles@Gravier.org> GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437 Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0x8DE6D026<http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0x8DE6D026&op=index>