Seriously, colors have been around since the early days — /bin/ls was perhaps the first most often used program that did colors.

BTW Novell/SUSE: Color changes are no good — I am still using the LS_COLORS scheme from SUSE 6.x. (Which is in the aaa_base of my repo, suser-jengelh.)

>Little contest: Post your colored shell as comment !

Highly advanced, and also available in aaa_base:

export PS1_XROOT="\[\e[1;30m\]\A \[\e[0;31m\]\h:\$(beautify_path) \[\e[1m\]#\[\e[0m\] ";
export PS1_XUSER="\[\e[1;30m\]\A \[\e[0;32m\]\h:\$(beautify_path) \[\e[1;37m\]>\[\e[0m\] ";

Time — you always need this; hostname — same, or you can accidentally end up deleting a file from the wrong server; and of course a (beautified) path that, if it is overly deep (in expanded form), does not take up the rest of the line!

have phun !