[troydavis]

It’s the Unix convention (shell expansion) for a the path to a user’s home directory: https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Tilde-Exp...

As a result, many Web servers exposed user-provided Web content using the same path: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/howto/public_html.html

Universities have continued using that convention, probably because professors have accounts (and thus URLs) for decades.

[codedrome]

I thought it might be something like that. Thanks for the explanation.