The @ symbol is the character of the internet age, but no one really knows where it came from.
In the past, few used the "at" sign. Most of all, it was useful for merchants or accountants.
But this changed thanks to Ray Tomlinson, the man considered by many to be the inventor of email.
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He ripped the @ off his keyboard in 1971 to place it between the username and the destination address when he sent the first message between two computers in his office, and so on. it changed the future of the curious doodle that until then had had a dignified life but without frights, sharing a key with a number.
Tomlinson chose @ because it was rarely used in computing at the time, and he wanted to avoid confusing older programs or operating systems.
In a happy coincidence, the English name of the symbol fitted very well: 'at' which means 'in'.
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In English, "the @ symbol appeared on typewriters before the end of the 19th century," Keith Houston, author of "Dark Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation," tells the BBC.
"It seemed to be a general symbol that meant 'this many things at this price.' It had no more use.
And, because typewriters included it, so did the first keyboards suitable for computers.
«The @ symbol was part of keyboards, because it was a work tool and had a commercial use«Says Houston.
It was understood by business users as a symbol to indicate the unit price, for example: 12 tissues @ £ 1 each.
Further back and elsewhere
In 2000, Italian academic Giorgio Stabile observed that many nations use different words for the @ symbol that describe what it looks like.
In Turkish it is 'pink', while in Norwegian it is 'pig's tail'. In Greek it is "duckling" and in Hungary it is "worm".
Stabile further noted that in French, Spanish and Portuguese it referred to arobase or arroba, the unit of weight and volume.
In Italian the name for the symbol is 'amphora', referring to the long-necked ceramic storage jars that have been used since ancient times.
Stabile discovered a letter sent from Seville to Rome in 1536, discussing the arrival in Spain of three ships sailing from the New World.
It indicated that a wine amphora had been sold and "amphora" had been replaced with the @ symbol as an abbreviation.
Stabile concluded the @ symbol was a common medieval shorthand for units of measurement in southern Europe, even if the precise units differed.
The Spanish journalist Jorge Pareja then found an even older use.
«I have read about the 16th century example of @ and remembered that I had seen the symbol before, when he was a history student at the University of Zaragoza. I went through my old papers and found customs records between Aragon and Castile in the 15th century. It meant 'at' as a measure of weight, and in this case an arroba of wheat.
@ men
But the oldest reference discovered until the @ symbol is a religious one. It appears in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle dating from 1345.
It is located in the Vatican Apostolic Library, and the @ symbol appears in place of the A in the word 'Amen'. The reason it was used in that context is a mystery.
It seems fitting then that the first email sent with the @ symbol was also lost in time.
When Tomlinson sent the first message to [email protected], he didn't anticipate how revolutionary it would be so he didn't bother to save it.
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