31 Oct
2019
31 Oct
'19
7:19 a.m.
On Wednesday, 30 October 2019 at 9:19:20 +0100, COFF wrote:
Harald Arnesen <skogtun(a)gmail.com> writes:
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 Î
But that's a delta, not a nabla. Fieldata also had a Î (code 04), and
I have never seen this switch.
FWIW, this was in Germany, where we called the @ a âKlammeraffeâ
(originally a spider monkey). This wasn't limited to UNIVAC.
Greg
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Harald Arnesen [29.10.2019 11:30]:
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. Warner Losh [28.10.2019 20:57]:
btw, we used to call it "grisehale" ("pig's tail"). "@Â Â " was the TOPS-20 prompt.
Also the Sintran (Norsk Data) prompt.