Tag Archives: History of #

The History of #- and 6 Other Symbols that Rule Twitter (and the Web)

Fascinating list from Kieth Huston at (or should I say @?) Time magazine concerning the above, a short history of six of the symbols now very commonly used in Twitter and around the web…and how they came to be:

http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/23/the-history-of-and-6-other-symbols-that-rule-twitter-and-the-web/

Not to sound too terribly nerdy, but I especially enjoyed item number 4, the slash (or / ) and what its significance is.

No, I’m not kidding.

If you’re too lazy to click on the link above, here’s the bit I found so intriguing:

In 1996, when Tim Berners-Lee was laying down the ground rules for his new computer network, he declared that website addresses should begin after a double slash, thus: “http://”. He explained that the double slash represented a sort of “root” for all addresses; google.com and time.com are top-level children of that root address, with other levels below them separated by single slashes (“http://time.com/us”). Taking his concept one step further, Berners-Lee gave the example of an imagined interplanetary telephone network—if all Earthly telephone numbers began with a double slash, he said, interplanetary numbers would begin with a triple slash, with the dialing code for Earth or Mars placed between “///” and “//”.