url URL date NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERtNUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER so i was researching the history of the tilde because d told me that her company just installed a new web proxy that denies access to any url with a tilde in it presumably because the presence of a tilde indicates with remarkable accuracy a personal site and apparently her employer believes that reading personal sites is not an appropriate use of company time which to be honest is probably accurate given the nature of her work but never mind that i don t want to talk about corporate politics i want to talk about the tilde every command line loving geek will tell you that stands for NUMBER home directory NUMBER and cd will take you to your home directory cd username will take you to someone else s except on mac os x where it will take you to their public file sharing directory it is from this heritage that we can trace the present day practice of using tildes in urls to denote personal pages since one single system wide configuration allowed individual users to have their own web sites by storing files in their own home directory or more commonly now that apache has taken over the world in their public_html subdirectory except on mac os x where if you turn on web sharing and point your browser to http localhost username you re actually being served files from that user s sites directory within their home directory but i don t want to talk about mac os x i want to talk about the tilde as with so many other things i find that jukka korpela NUMBER is the expert in this field jukka is no doubt a member of my karass NUMBER a word which google old habits die hard NUMBER feels is best explained by the personal site of eugene wallingford which like jukka s home page can not be referenced without a tilde in fact jukka has written a lengthy treatise on why the tilde should not be used in urls NUMBER a treatise which i feel obliged to point out contains a tilde in its url clearly the tilde is underappreciated digging further we find this post of jukka s from NUMBER NUMBER in which we learn that the tilde was not meant to be the tilde at all but rather an odd character called the overline presumably to balance out the underline if indeed those sorts of things require balance there is balance in the universe to be sure but i am less sure that it eminates from my keyboard no matter the tilde was the tilde so that spanish typing types could type the ntilde now referenced in html as the named entity ntilde but somewhere along the line it morphed into a general purpose character with all sorts of geeky uses digging even further it appears that the tilde was originally an alternate for NUMBER then an alternate for and its life as an overline replacement came even later jukka confirms this NUMBER and adds a timeline NUMBER for NUMBER for NUMBER for overline then june NUMBER NUMBER the watershed moment in an xNUMBER committee meeting when it was proposed NUMBER as exclusively a tilde in usa to appease share NUMBER i can find no further reference as to what this acronym means or what this committee meeting was about the next reference isn t until NUMBER when the tilde was officially added to iso NUMBER NUMBER and now down the rabbit hole we go scouring usenet which the kids of yesterday called NUMBER deja news NUMBER and kids today call NUMBER google groups NUMBER we find a reprint of a NUMBER william safire yes _that_ william safire article on language NUMBER in which we learn that is officially pronounced NUMBER squiggle NUMBER this is confirmed by the jargon dictionary NUMBER to this very day i m not sure this is useful but i just thought it was cool to see william safire writing about the proper pronunciation of various ascii characters as early as august NUMBER tilde was included in the waka waka bang splat poem NUMBER in july NUMBER kermit gained support for filenames containing a tilde NUMBER in february NUMBER an editor s note to an otherwise unrelated article notes that fidonet supported ascii characters space through tilde NUMBER as early as january NUMBER less used the tilde to denote lines past eof NUMBER as early as july NUMBER troff supported the tilde NUMBER in november NUMBER a mod sources post refers to bourne shell enhancements history tilde job control NUMBER as early as january NUMBER tilde was included on the dec keyboard NUMBER and listed in the apl NUMBER character set NUMBER in april NUMBER tilde was causing bugs in vi NUMBER actually due to underlying bugs in csh in december NUMBER is officially pronounced NUMBER tilde NUMBER NUMBER prompting this typographical pun NUMBER and that s the earliest reference i can find so where does that leave us unsatisfied no doubt there is history here but there are gaps what happened at that watershed meeting in NUMBER how did the tilde rise to prominence in the NUMBERs when did it become a synonym for NUMBER home directory NUMBER when did it migrate into the world of web servers to provide a cheap and simple way of giving individual users their own web sites i don t know and the lateness of the hour prevents me from continuing my research a failing for which i apologize profusely goodnight goodnight may you dream of tildes stars and whorls NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL 