28 Oct
2019
28 Oct
'19
9:08 p.m.
On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Michael Kjörling wrote:
On 27 Oct 2019 21:11 -0400, from usotsuki(a)buric.co
(Steve Nickolas):
86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character. This was changed for
IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0.
-uso.
I can't imagine there's any such connection. MS-DOS got it from CP/M, which
didn't even have the concept of subdirectories until after MS-DOS did.
If there was such a relationship, it would probably make more sense
for the command prompt termination character to be ":", not ">",
as
DOS labelled devices as [whatever]: (like "A:" or "NUL:"). So I
agree
with Steve; I imagine it's unrelated. They just had to use _something_
as a default to indicate that the computer is waiting for a command,
and ">" is as good a character as any.