URL: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/04.html#history_of_the_tilde
Date: 2002-10-04T00:27:41-05:00
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 &#8220;home
directory&#8221;, 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[1] is the expert in
this field. Jukka is no doubt a member of my karass[2], a word which Google (
old habits die hard[3]) 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[4], 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 1998[5], 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
#[6], then an alternate for ^, and its life as an overline replacement came
even later. Jukka confirms this[7] and adds a timeline: 1963 for #, 1964 for ^,
1966 for overline. Then June 30, 1966, the watershed moment in an X3 committee
meeting, when it was proposed &#8220;as exclusively a tilde in USA to appease
SHARE&#8221;. 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 1991,
when the tilde was officially added to ISO-646[8].
And now, down the rabbit hole we go. Scouring Usenet (which the kids of
yesterday called &#8220;Deja News&#8221;, and kids today call &#8220;Google
Groups&#8221;), we find a reprint of a 1991 William Safire (yes, _that_ William
Safire) article On Language[9], in which we learn that ~ is officially
pronounced &#8220;squiggle&#8221;. This is confirmed by the Jargon Dictionary
[10] 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 1990, tilde was included in the waka waka bang splat poem
[11].
In July 1989, Kermit gained support for filenames containing a tilde[12].
In February 1988, an editor's note to an otherwise unrelated article notes that
Fidonet supported ASCII characters space through tilde[13].
As early as January 1987, less used the tilde to denote lines past EOF[14].
As early as July 1986, troff supported the tilde[15].
In November 1985, a mod.sources post refers to Bourne shell enhancements
(history,tilde,job control)[16].
As early as January 1984, tilde was included on the DEC keyboard[17] and listed
in the APL-11 character set[18].
In April 1983, tilde was causing bugs in vi[19] (actually due to underlying
bugs in csh).
In December 1982, ~ is officially pronounced &#8220;tilde&#8221;[20], prompting
this typographical pun[21].
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 1966? How did the
tilde rise to prominence in the 1980s? When did it become a synonym for
&#8220;home directory&#8221;? 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.
[1]  http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
[2]  http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html#words
[3]  http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/03.html#when_an_engineer_flaps_his_wings
[4]  http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/tilde.html
[5]  http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3627ac95.66099519%40news.cs.hut.fi
[6]  http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=an_600051281
[7]  http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7E
[8]  http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html
[9]  http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=735627391.AA02027%40Clone.his.com
[10] http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/a/ASCII.html
[11] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=14595%40shlump.nac.dec.com
[12] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=CMM.0.88.616446576.cmg%40watsun.cc.columbia.edu
[13] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4036%40hoptoad.uucp
[14] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=669%40kodak.UUCP
[15] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3197%40jhunix.UUCP
[16] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2428%40cal-asd.fluke.UUCP
[17] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=778%40brl-bmd.UUCP
[18] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2405%40decwrl.UUCP
[19] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.ucf-cs.904
[20] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.ucbcad.162
[21] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.hp-pcd.546