I had two pieces due for Businessweek, so I should have gone to bed right then. A few friends fired back: Sure! Or “Yes if serious.” Here is what it looks like to use a Unix machine remotely over a secure shell connection:Īs drab and retro as that may seem, there’s a lot of power and value inside that setup. From the humble command line you can write things and save web pages. This is what hackers type into in movies. When you log in a “shell” program runs that lets you issue commands. The “~” is a little like the on Twitter-a shortcut that says: “Here is a person.”īy now I was well in the bag and listening to Stevie Nicks ( sounds like she’s singing, hoo, hoo, hoo), so I tweeted out, “YES also i (sic.) just registered and will given (sic.) anyone a shell account who wants one.”Ī “shell account” gives you access to use a computer. The early personal web grew up around these little “tilde sites” that’s what preceded blogging. (You were “vixen.”) And you could put some web pages at that address. So! Back in ye olden Inter-Net tymes of the 1990s, if you were a (then youngish) nerd like me, you’d get an account on some server called and your web address would be.

A website-managing friend of mine promptly wrote back: “tildes are only ever properly used in front of usernames on shared hosting.” Wait, what? On “~”

“You use tildes instead of colons or dashes, it’s more like handwriting.” “That’s a west coast thing,” said Mo, who grew up in California. I was perplexed by the tilde character-“~”-that Stevie Nicks uses throughout her writing.

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