[TUHS] Where did the "~" come from

[George Michaelson]

A related but different "thing" is when the cd activity became a
pushdown stack of 2 (is it more? I never bothered checking)

somebody realised going "there and back again" was innately useful.

(I will never forget working on systems which had cd-moral-equivalent
<down> and no cd-moral-equivalent <up> but having cd-moral-equivalent
$HOME making all directory traversals downward, or back to your
personal root)

sorry for thread hijack.

-G

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 8:42 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> > In our exchange, someone observed suggested that Joy might have picked
> > it up because the HOME key was part of the tilde key on the ADM3A, which
> > were popular at UCB [i.e. the reason hjkl are the movement keys on vi is
> > the were embossed on the top of those keys on the ADM3A].  It also was
> > noted that the ASR-33 lacks a ~ key on its keyboard.  But Lesk
> > definitely needed something to represent a remote user's home directory
> > because each system was different, so he was forced to use something.
>
> The ADM-3A was one of the best terminals ever made.
>
> > It was also noted that there was plenty of cross-pollination going on as
> > students and researchers moved from site to site, so it could have been BTL
> > to UCB, vice-versa, or some other path altogether.
> >
> > So two questions for this august body are:
> >  1. Where did the ~ as $HOME convention come to UNIX?
>
> Gawd...  I think I saw it in PWB, but I'm likely wrong.
>
> >  2. Did UNIX create the idiom, or was there an earlier system such as CTSS,
> >     TENEX, ITS, MTS, TSS, or the like supported it?
>
> No idea. but given that Unix inherited a lot of stuff....
>
> -- Dave