NCSA httpd supported an option that allowed every user on a system to put html documents in a specially named directory and have them instantly served up to the world. User created content exploded--undergraduates (like me) were instantly addicted.
I'm not even sure who came up with ~/public_html (Rob McCool or Ari Luotonen are the primary suspects) but whoever it was will always be an undersung hero of the web.
That's funny...I've never thought of it that way, taking Github and AWS S3 so much for granted these days...but one of things students really liked in a class I taught on using the Unix shell was the ability to automate the pushing of files to their school account folder and have it show up immediately at stanford.edu/~theirusername
It's still pretty cool in this day and age of PaaS, and well, social networks...but was much more revolutionary in the pre-MySpace days (and post-MySpace too, if you had something you wanted to post that deserved a little more gravitas than a social media wall post)
I remember when someone started running httpd on our university network, and the universal reaction was 'seriously? It's reading stuff out of our private home directories and broadcasting it to anyone who asks? WTF, get this thing turned off immediately!'.
\*nix home dirs aren't really "private". They usually default to world-readable, and in a university environment (at least one like mine) there was a culture where people expected friends to look at them.
> world readable ... there was a culture where people expected friends to look at them
Same here. The default user home from /etc/skel (or some equivalent) had a user-access-only area that we were told to put sensitive work (individually marked projects where we were explicitly expected/told not to collaborate on) and other such into. We could protect other directories a little more too if needed, or even open up bits of that one to "group" or "other" (at our own risk) and there were specific groups setup for explicitly collaborative projects (these days I would do away with that and control such collaboration through git or its ilk).
NCSA httpd supported an option that allowed every user on a system to put html documents in a specially named directory and have them instantly served up to the world. User created content exploded--undergraduates (like me) were instantly addicted.
I'm not even sure who came up with ~/public_html (Rob McCool or Ari Luotonen are the primary suspects) but whoever it was will always be an undersung hero of the web.