Two and a half years ago, I wrote a PS1 which renders current working directory with colors and abbreviate directory names. Today, I recoded it a bit.
Screenshot on top is the old one. You can see this diff view of my .bashrc. Generally, the newer one has same result, I only added color to the ~. I used the newer Bash syntax [[]] and (()) instead of the old test [].
My original plan was to use C code, unfortunately, those escape code, \[, \], or \e, must not be from $variable or results from subshell, they have to be apparent strings in PS1. If you know how to resolve this issue, please let me know. If you only want to shorten PWD and do not need these fancy colors, there is an one-liner version.
Two and a half years, many things have changed, you just can see from the screenshots. I have switched to Gentoo from Fedora, GNOME to Fluxbox, GNOME Terminal to urxvt, GNU/Screen to tmux (this didn't show in screenshot), eyecandy (Compiz Fusion, IIRC) to plain, mainly use CLI. I used to run su -, now I just sudo. And the kernel version from 2.6.23 to 2.6.32.
Many things have changed.

When I was a kid (around 10, almost 20 years ago, '90s), one day my father brought a IBM 5550. It had a program, which I totally have no idea what's the command name. You can draw a line on a plane, then it will generate a 3D image as follows.

I didn't know English at the moment, I doubt I could even spell English correctly. I wrote a similar version using JavaScript + HTML5 Canvas, I am not sure if it's the same result, but it should be pretty close.

Play it!

Only test with Chromium 6.0 and Firefox 3.6, so please don't swear if it doesn't work for your favorite browser.

Your Masterpiece

Your creativity will be placed below, so you can save them if you like. Note: the image doesn't have background color actually.

Do you know it?

So, do you know the name of this command? The only things I could still remember are that computer ran MS-DOS, I think. And the monitor is a yellow monochrome CRT (That's the reason I made the drawing yellow) It was an auction item, so the program probably was installed by the previous owner.

And do you know what you can call this kind of process?