From ~marado to @marado
Speaking yesterday with someone about tilde.pt, which he found out about due to my contributions to botany, it took me a while but I did realize that there is a generational issue recognizing a ~, or, in particular, recognizing it as a way to refer to someone.
Once upon a time, before @username was the common way to refer to a person (who
came with that first? twitter?), ~username was so. UNIX users will still be
probably used to do things like cd ~ to go to their $HOME, or even ~user
to refer to some other person's home. But I do not think that's where the most
common ~ recognition comes from: instead, what people will most remember is
the number of websites of "white pages" (as some other person refered about
them to me as), that had, as an address, http://institution/~username.
So, where does this ~ come from? Well, there was a time where every machine
connected to the web was more or less expected to have Apache's
httpd running, and it had a useful module, called
mod_userdir. UserDir actually was inherited: Apache's httpd started in 1995
as a continuation of the NCSA HTTPd webserver, and NCSA not only had the
UserDir directive, it was actually active by
default.
What does all this means? Well, it means that, by default, UNIX machines with a
webserver running would probably have NCSA or later Apache's httpd, which, by
default, would be allowing each of that server's users to have their own
website, at the address http://server.address/~username , and to have something
in there they'd just have to put some html pages into their public_html
directory.
tags: history, tilde, UNIX, username, apache, httpd, userdir, en