In Urbit, every node has a name that’s both a piece of cryptographic property and a routable network address. These names look like ~sun or ~marzod or ~ravmel-ropdyl.
-
-
Show this thread
-
Each of these names is just a number. ~sun is 15. ~ravmel-ropdyl is 4,391,936.
Show this thread -
Azimuth, our Ethereum contracts, store a list of who owns which names.
Show this thread -
And Arvo, our OS, lets you send packets to any of these names.
Show this thread -
The scheme for encoding these names is called ‘
@p’ — it’s our algorithm for making numbers both pronounceable and memorable.Show this thread -
There’s some deep nerd memory that will always connect ~ to ‘user’. Perhaps someone else can dig up exactly where this started. Does it start with the home directory in Unix?
Show this thread -
That would have been somewhat impossible. So, we thought, a character could work. Something that could be printed in the command line.
Show this thread -
We used to call Urbit nodes ‘ships’. So there was some thought to make it somehow nautical.
Show this thread -
We tried a few weird UTF-8 options. For a while we almost used triangle that Zeit ended up using, since it looked a bit like a sail.
Show this thread -
The ~ just fit. It’s about the user, it vaguely resembles the sea and it naturally appears all over the place in our interfaces.
Show this thread -
At the end of the day, should infrastructure be ‘branded’? Probably not. Great infrastructure is invisible.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.