In the old days, you were a member of an organisation such as a university or a corporation. You had a home directory on an NFS server and in your home dir was a folder called public_html that you put your homepage in. So your URL was www.university.ac.uk/~username and your email address was username@university.ac.uk
This caused problems whenever anyone moved so in the early days centralised services were seen as a solution such as Hotmail and Geocities. No one in 1995 realised how it would turn out into abusive monopolies...
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In the old days, you were a member of an organisation such as a university or a corporation. You had a home directory on an NFS server and in your home dir was a folder called public_html that you put your homepage in. So your URL was www.university.ac.uk/~username and your email address was username@university.ac.uk
This caused problems whenever anyone moved so in the early days centralised services were seen as a solution such as Hotmail and Geocities. No one in 1995 realised how it would turn out into abusive monopolies...