@

Why the @ Sign?

The man who first put the @ sign into the structure of email addresses was Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer who in 1971 performed what he calls "a quick hack" and sent the first electronic message — to himself. Why did he pick the sign? "I scanned the keyboard for a sign that wouldn’t appear on anyone’s name, and couldn’t therefore create any confusion."

But how did the @sign end up on the computer keyboard in the first place?

Linguists are divided. Some think it originated in the early Middle Ages, when monks laboring over manuscripts contracted the versatile Latin word "ad" — which can mean "at" or "towards" or "by" — into a single character. Most linguists, however, say that the @ sign is a more recent invention, appearing sometime during the 18^th century as a commercial symbol indicating price per unit, as in "5 apples @ 10 pence." Yet another linguist, researcher, Denis Muzerelle, says the sign is the result of a different twist, when the accent over the word "à" used by French and German merchants was hastily extended.

But last July an Italian researcher discovered some 14^th century Venetian commercial documents clearly marked by the @ sign, where it was used to represent a gauge of quantity, the "anfora" or jar. Giorgion Stabile also found a Latin-Spanish dictionary dating from 1492 where "anfora" is translated into "arroba," a measure of weight. It’s therefore natural that, in 1885, the "commercial a" was included on the keyboard of the first model of Underwood typewriter and from there migrated into the standard set of computing characters (such as ASCII) 80 years later.