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.
Part of the 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.
The homepage describes itself as a Unix server in the spirit of 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 discusses a generated list of recently updated Squiggle City homepages. One Squiggle City resident 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 and compare the contemporary tilde-community notes.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #ancientweb, #unix, #onlinecommunities, #homepages, #tildeverse