Society to Help Allieve Redundant Effort
Mark Pilgrim: ...when it was proposed “as exclusively a tilde in USA to appease SHARE”. I can find no further reference as to what this acronym means. I'm pretty sure it stands for United States of America.
It makes perfect sense that SHARE (arguably the longest running computer user's group who's tagline, "It's not an acronym, it's what we do" codifies the organization's mission: sharing information and experience for the good of all. SHARE meets twice annually.) would have advocated the tilde in 1966. After all, the tilde was nestled between the lowercase "r" and lowercase "s" in the original version of EBCDIC. Of course, there were versions of EBCDIC before the original version of EBCDIC, but they had the foresight to leave a gap for this important character.
Update: it has been educational watching Mark's history of the tilda grow before my eyes. Makes me wonder, however, if I shouldn't have been posting Apache's SOAP interop information here lest some web proxy decides to block it.
History of the tilde
So I was researching the history of the tilde, because D told me that her company just installed a new web proxy that denies access to any URL with a tilde in it. Presumably because the presence of a tilde indicates with remarkable accuracy a personal site, and apparently her employer believes that reading personal sites is not an appropriate use of company time. Which, to be honest, is probably accurate, given the nature of her work. But never mind that. I don't want to talk about corporate politics. I want to talk about the tilde.... [more]Trackback from dive into mark at