[TUHS] What's In a Prompt String?

[Steffen Nurpmeso via TUHS]

segaloco via TUHS wrote in
 <hy0Wz3aAx-kcLtMuf4ojqunmhwc5V_iry8qO2R7WaLU0nJ5PNOLToEUmNBwun3Y3bG7Hv13\
 o91QOGmbHRUg9fnqZZ8xok80997Ywpqr_Ggc=@protonmail.com>:
 |On Tuesday, April 28th, 2026 at 12:35, Steffen Nurpmeso via TUHS <tuhs at t\
 |uhs.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

Ah!  I was looking at the UNIX history repository, which does not
seem to have integrated disassembled things from 1972_stuff/.
(I actually do not even know in how far all those different things
from Distributions/Research/, if at all in source form, are
combined in there.)

 |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 \

You surely will not get any answer from me.  I have seen the C
sources of the kernel, and read what Dennis Ritchie and Warren
had written, just now (again).

 |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).

I am not busy looping on this.  But you are not talking about the
prompt of the shell?  (I in turn would be interested in evolutions
of the mail program, McIlroy wrote ~"never satisfied with its
exact behaviour" and mentioned everyone was hacking on it; in 2015
i had put the manual of it here writing

    From "The Unix Tree" (<http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl>):

      The third edition of Unix was the last version with a kernel
      still written in assembly code, but is the first version to
      include pipes. For much of 1973, the existing Third Edition was
      maintained and improved, while the kernel was rewritten in C to
      become the Fourth Edition of Unix.

      For the Third Edition of Unix we only have part of the
      C compiler, and the manual pages.
    ...)

 |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.

I sounds fuzzy but i would believe many things look obscure from
a future point of view, whereas they simply worked / lived with /
programmed on and for what they had.  It all seemed to have been
in fluctuation, what is today called a "rolling release", .. if at
all "release", Readme.nsys quotes "The number of UNIX
installations is now above 20....".

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)