@ Large

CNet today mentions alternative terms for the "@" symbol that has become ubiquitous in our lives. This seems like as good a time as any to repeat a little history of the symbol I compiled for an e-letter a couple years ago:

Ever wonder where the “@” sign came from? It’s been a standard character on computer keyboards (and before that typewriters) practically since day one, and it’s a ubiquitous symbol these days, but it dates from the days of monk-based communication—in Medieval manuscript copying, “@” was how monks abbreviated the word “ad” which is Latin for “at.”

However, “@” as we know it technically comes not from Latin but Spanish.
In the 15th century, the symbol “@” began to be used an abbreviation of the word “arroba,” which is a Spanish and Portuguese unit of measure (equivalent to 25.37 pounds in Mexico and 32.38 pounds in Brazil) used in trade. The sign “@” itself soon came to become associated not with the weight of shipments but with billing and invoicing—“3 goats @ $5.00,” where it remained for centuries. As a result, it was for many people an arcane symbol that was merely the shift of the “2” key.

Until 1971. Bolt Beranek and Newman was a company hired by the U.S. Department of Defense to build the first Internet (then called ARPANET). One of the team members was a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson, and in 1971 he invented the ability to send electronic messages from one computer to another. Naturally, messages needed to be addressed in some way so that the file transfer system knew where to send them. Tomlinson chose the “@” symbol to refer to what user was “at” which computer. The first e-mail message ever sent? The decidedly prosaic “QWERTYUIOP,” which was sent from a computer over the ARPANET to the computer sitting right next to it.

E-mail wouldn’t become ubiquitous until more than 20 years later.
Interestingly, one of the first organizations to grok the idea of e-mail was, seemingly ironically, the U.S. Postal Service. In the 1970s, the Post Office had created a system called E-Com, which was a network of 25 sites around the country among which electronic messages could be transmitted. Letters could be “e-mailed” (or “E-Commed,” you could probably say) from one site to another, where they could be printed on what was considered at the time to be high-speed laser printers. Once received and printed, a message could then be delivered as first class mail to the ultimate recipient.

But it was not to be. The telephone and telegraph companies freaked out about the idea of the Post Office becoming their competition, so they ran to the FCC, who, post haste (as it were), barred the Postal Service from getting into the electronic message business. As a kludge, the Post Office tried “snail mailing” magnetic tapes from site-to-site, but that was far less compelling. And that was the end of E-Com.