A fascinating look at the rise of the "@" symbol:
Ever since the 1500s, and for
hundreds of years after, the only people who used @ were bookkeepers, who used
it as a shorthand to show how much they were selling or buying goods for: for
example, "3 bottles of wine @ $10 each."
Since these bookkeepers used @ to
deal with money, a certain degree of whimsical fondness for the character
developed over time. In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”;
the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in
Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine,
a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.
Even with such cute names to
recommend it, though, @ languished in obscurity for three and a half centuries,
only ending up on a new invention called the typewriter when salesmen realized
that accountants and bookkeepers were buying them in droves.
In 1971, however, a keyboard with a
vestigial @ symbol inherited from its typewriter ancestors found itself hooked
up to an ARPANET terminal manned by Ray Tomlinson, who was
working on a little program he’d come up with in his goofing-off time to send
messages from computer to computer. Tomlinson ended up using the @ symbol as
the fulcrum of the lever that ultimately ended up lifting the world into the
digital age: email.
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| An early use of @, from a 1674 Swedish legal document |
(h/t The Dish)
