[COFF] Fieldata characters (was: Comparative promptology)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday, 30 October 2019 at  9:19:20 +0100, COFF wrote:
> Harald Arnesen <skogtun at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Harald Arnesen [29.10.2019 11:30]:
>>> Warner Losh [28.10.2019 20:57]:
>>>
>>>> "@Â Â " 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.

I worked for and with UNIVAC for most of the 1970s and early 1980s,
including on EXEC 8/OS 1100, and the master space (binary 0) was
always represented by @, on punched cards, printouts, terminals and
the documentation.  I've just confirmed with my copy of UP-4040,
dating from 1971.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldata#UNIVAC
agrees, though it notes:

   Sometimes switched with Δ

But that's a delta, not a nabla.  Fieldata also had a Δ (code 04), and
I have never seen this switch.

FWIW, this was in Germany, where we called the @ a „Klammeraffe“
(originally a spider monkey).  This wasn't limited to UNIVAC.

Greg
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