[TUHS] Where did the "~" come from

[Ron Natalie]

 Not only were they embossed on the keys but I believe those control keys moved the cursor in those directions.   The Adm 1 and 3 were some of my first terminals.  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 18, 2020, at 19:46, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> 
> 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