# Ancient Web: Squiggle City Brought the Unix Tilde Homepage Back in 2014 Squiggle City revives shared Unix accounts and personal tilde homepages, preserving a directory of hand-written sites associated with the 2014 tilde-community resurgence. 2026-10-13 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: Squiggle City Brought the Unix Tilde Homepage Back in 2014](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). Squiggle City looks less like a contemporary web service than a neighborhood directory written by a town clerk who happens to love ASCII art. [Visit Squiggle City](https://squiggle.city/). The homepage describes itself as a Unix server in the spirit of [tilde.club](https://tilde.club/). Its purpose is to let people make personal pages and learn the command line. The introductory text points newcomers to *Userland*, a tutorial about working with Unix, and then displays an index of users identified by traditional tilde addresses: `~jbd`, `~eric`, `~brennen`, and many more. This is a later historical exception with a clear reason to be here. It belongs to the 2014 revival of public-access Unix environments, deliberately recreating the older shared-computer convention where each user could publish pages at a path beginning with a tilde. ## A homepage is a privilege, not a product tier The index has a title and a modification timestamp for each user's entry. Some headings are introductory. Others are strange or specific: 'flying toaster dreams', 'The Lobster Den', 'A Curmudgeonly Place', and 'someday is chartreuse'. A local newspaper, an arcade, and a text-adventure corner are linked above the address book. Contemporary posts from the wider tilde community establish the period. A [November 2014 account](https://status.tilde.club/~_/) discusses a generated list of recently updated Squiggle City homepages. One [Squiggle City resident](https://squiggle.city/~kache2k/) also wrote about making a personal tilde-club-like space that November. Some residents have disappeared behind expired links, while others kept updating their pages. The index is therefore partly a living directory and partly a frozen record of people who tried making their own tiny websites. A shared Unix server is not the same as a 1990s commercial hosting service, and nothing here proves that every listed user's page is still working. What survives is a different idea of online identity: a shell account, a text editor, some HTML files, and an address that belongs to a small host rather than a major social platform. The revival matters because it did not merely imitate a retro visual style. It brought back the publishing mechanism that made much of the early web possible. [Browse the Squiggle City residents](https://squiggle.city/) and compare the [contemporary tilde-community notes](https://status.tilde.club/~_/). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#unix](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/unix/), [#onlinecommunities](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/onlinecommunities/), [#homepages](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/homepages/), [#tildeverse](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/tildeverse/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-squiggle-city-brought-the-unix-tilde-homepage-back-in-2014/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-10-14T00:58:06+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:04:36.025342+00:00 Description: A 2014 public Unix server remains a miniature neighborhood of personal websites, text experiments, and command-line learning.