[TUHS] What's In a Prompt String?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, April 28th, 2026 at 12:35, Steffen Nurpmeso via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 
> Actually only V1 had
> 
>   at:
>           <@ >
> 
> --steffen
>

This can also be seen my restoration of the V2 shell sources here:

https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v2src/-/blob/master/cmd/sh.s

The V3 manuals give the shell prompt as '%'.  What I don't know is if the V3 shell would've been the first version written in C, or, like the kernel, was an intermediate PDP-11/45 version in assembly.  The preserved "s1" sources of V3 are pretty close to my restored V2 work except that they used the enhanced mathematical capabilities of the 11/45 directly (whereas the V1 and V2 programs use the memory-mapped EAE with address symbols provided by the assembler).

In this regard V3 is currently the most mysterious an obscure of the research versions because it isn't quite PDP-11/20 UNIX but it isn't the C-based system of V4 either.

- Matt G.