146 lines
7.4 KiB
Plaintext
146 lines
7.4 KiB
Plaintext
From rssfeeds@jmason.org Fri Oct 4 11:01:50 2002
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To: yyyy@spamassassin.taint.org
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From: diveintomark <rssfeeds@spamassassin.taint.org>
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Subject: History of the tilde
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Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 08:00:03 -0000
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Content-Type: text/plain; encoding=utf-8
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URL: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/04.html#history_of_the_tilde
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Date: 2002-10-04T00:27:41-05:00
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So I was researching the history of the tilde, because D told me that her
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company just installed a new web proxy that denies access to any URL with a
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tilde in it. Presumably because the presence of a tilde indicates with
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remarkable accuracy a personal site, and apparently her employer believes that
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reading personal sites is not an appropriate use of company time. Which, to be
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honest, is probably accurate, given the nature of her work. But never mind
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that. I don't want to talk about corporate politics. I want to talk about the
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tilde.
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Every command-line-loving geek will tell you that ~ stands for “home
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directory”, and cd ~ will take you to your home directory. (cd ~username
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will take you to someone else's, except on Mac OS X, where it will take you to
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their Public file sharing directory.) It is from this heritage that we can
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trace the present-day practice of using tildes in URLs to denote personal
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pages, since one single system-wide configuration allowed individual users to
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have their own web sites by storing files in their own home directory. Or, more
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commonly now that Apache has taken over the world, in their public_html
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subdirectory, except on Mac OS X, where if you turn on web sharing and point
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your browser to http://localhost/~username/, you're actually being served files
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from that user's Sites directory within their home directory.
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But I don't want to talk about Mac OS X. I want to talk about the tilde.
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As with so many other things, I find that Jukka Korpela[1] is the expert in
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this field. Jukka is no doubt a member of my karass[2], a word which Google (
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old habits die hard[3]) feels is best explained by the personal site of Eugene
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Wallingford, which, like Jukka's home page, can not be referenced without a
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tilde.
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In fact, Jukka has written a lengthy treatise on why the tilde should not be
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used in URLs[4], a treatise which, I feel obliged to point out, contains a
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tilde in its URL.
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Clearly, the tilde is underappreciated.
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Digging further, we find this post of Jukka's from 1998[5], in which we learn
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that the tilde was not meant to be the tilde at all, but rather an odd
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character called the overline. Presumably to balance out the underline, if
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indeed those sorts of things require balance. There is balance in the universe,
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to be sure, but I am less sure that it eminates from my keyboard. No matter.
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The tilde was the tilde so that Spanish-typing types could type the ñ
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(now referenced in HTML as the named entity ñ), but somewhere along
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the line, it morphed into a general-purpose character with all sorts of geeky
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uses.
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Digging even further, it appears that the tilde was originally an alternate for
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#[6], then an alternate for ^, and its life as an overline replacement came
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even later. Jukka confirms this[7] and adds a timeline: 1963 for #, 1964 for ^,
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1966 for overline. Then June 30, 1966, the watershed moment in an X3 committee
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meeting, when it was proposed “as exclusively a tilde in USA to appease
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SHARE”. I can find no further reference as to what this acronym means, or
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what this committee meeting was about. The next reference isn't until 1991,
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when the tilde was officially added to ISO-646[8].
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And now, down the rabbit hole we go. Scouring Usenet (which the kids of
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yesterday called “Deja News”, and kids today call “Google
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Groups”), we find a reprint of a 1991 William Safire (yes, _that_ William
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Safire) article On Language[9], in which we learn that ~ is officially
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pronounced “squiggle”. This is confirmed by the Jargon Dictionary
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[10] to this very day. I'm not sure this is useful, but I just thought it was
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cool to see William Safire writing about the proper pronunciation of various
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ASCII characters.
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As early as August 1990, tilde was included in the waka waka bang splat poem
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[11].
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In July 1989, Kermit gained support for filenames containing a tilde[12].
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In February 1988, an editor's note to an otherwise unrelated article notes that
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Fidonet supported ASCII characters space through tilde[13].
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As early as January 1987, less used the tilde to denote lines past EOF[14].
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As early as July 1986, troff supported the tilde[15].
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In November 1985, a mod.sources post refers to Bourne shell enhancements
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(history,tilde,job control)[16].
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As early as January 1984, tilde was included on the DEC keyboard[17] and listed
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in the APL-11 character set[18].
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In April 1983, tilde was causing bugs in vi[19] (actually due to underlying
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bugs in csh).
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In December 1982, ~ is officially pronounced “tilde”[20], prompting
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this typographical pun[21].
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And that's the earliest reference I can find.
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So where does that leave us? Unsatisfied, no doubt. There is history here, but
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there are gaps. What happened at that watershed meeting in 1966? How did the
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tilde rise to prominence in the 1980s? When did it become a synonym for
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“home directory”? When did it migrate into the world of web servers
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to provide a cheap and simple way of giving individual users their own web
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sites? I don't know, and the lateness of the hour prevents me from continuing
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my research, a failing for which I apologize profusely. Goodnight, goodnight.
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May you dream of tildes, stars, and whorls.
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[1] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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[2] http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html#words
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[3] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/03.html#when_an_engineer_flaps_his_wings
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[4] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/tilde.html
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[5] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3627ac95.66099519%40news.cs.hut.fi
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[6] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=an_600051281
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[7] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7E
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[8] http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html
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[9] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=735627391.AA02027%40Clone.his.com
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[10] http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/a/ASCII.html
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[11] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=14595%40shlump.nac.dec.com
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[12] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=CMM.0.88.616446576.cmg%40watsun.cc.columbia.edu
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[13] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4036%40hoptoad.uucp
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[14] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=669%40kodak.UUCP
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[15] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3197%40jhunix.UUCP
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[16] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2428%40cal-asd.fluke.UUCP
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[17] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=778%40brl-bmd.UUCP
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[18] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2405%40decwrl.UUCP
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[19] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.ucf-cs.904
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[20] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.ucbcad.162
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[21] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.hp-pcd.546
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