A Brief History of the @ Sign

I came across an article on the web that discusses the history of the @ sign (see: Internet Star @ Least 473 Years Old). I found it to be very interesting and want to share it with you. Below is an excerpt from it:

Because it is used in every e-mail address and many tweets, you might be forgiven for thinking that the remarkably common symbol @, which English-speakers know as the “at sign,” but Italians call a “snail,” and south Slavs know as a “monkey,” is a fairly recent invention....The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported in 2000 that Giorgio Stabile, who was then a professor of the history of science @ La Sapienza University in Rome, had come across the symbol in [a] merchant’s letter, where it was used to indicate an ancient measure of weight or volume, an amphora. The Spanish word for amphora was “arroba,” and the Oxford English Dictionary explains that the unit was approximately 25 pounds of a solid or about 3 gallons of a liquid. In modern Spanish, the @ symbol on keyboards is still called an arroba — as a Google image search illustrates. The word “arroba” itself was a Spanish corruption of an older Arabic word.

The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of” in records of transactions written by English merchants. That’s why the symbol was sitting on a computer keyboard in 1971 when an engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to send the first e-mail. As Mr. Tomlinson himself has explained in a description of that first e-mail: I chose to append an at sign and the host name to the user’s (login) name. I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense. The purpose of the at sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). I used the at sign to indicate that the user was “at” some other host rather than being local.

Comments

[Murilo Melo]

Just for the records, it is also called arroba in Portuguese. Regards, Murilo Melo