The Accidental History of the @ Symbol
Once a rarely used key on the typewriter, the graceful character has become the very symbol of modern electronic communication
- By William F. Allman
- Smithsonian magazine, September 2012, Subscribe
Called the “snail” by Italians and the “monkey tail” by the Dutch, @ is the sine qua non of electronic communication, thanks to e-mail addresses and Twitter handles. @ has even been inducted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which cited its modern use as an example of “elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time.”
The origin of the symbol itself, one of the most graceful characters on the keyboard, is something of a mystery. One theory is that medieval monks, looking for shortcuts while copying manuscripts, converted the Latin word for “toward”—ad—to “a” with the back part of the “d” as a tail. Or it came from the French word for “at”—à—and scribes, striving for efficiency, swept the nib of the pen around the top and side. Or the symbol evolved from an abbreviation of “each at”—the “a” being encased by an “e.” The first documented use was in 1536, in a letter by Francesco Lapi, a Florentine merchant, who used @ to denote units of wine called amphorae, which were shipped in large clay jars.
The symbol later took on a historic role in commerce. Merchants have long used it to signify “at the rate of”—as in “12 widgets @ $1.” (That the total is $12, not $1, speaks to the symbol’s pivotal importance.) Still, the machine age was not so kind to @. The first typewriters, built in the mid-1800s, didn’t include @. Likewise, @ was not among the symbolic array of the earliest punch-card tabulating systems (first used in collecting and processing the 1890 U.S. census), which were precursors to computer programming.
The symbol’s modern obscurity ended in 1971, when a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson was facing a vexing problem: how to connect people who programmed computers with one another. At that time, each programmer was typically connected to a particular mainframe machine via a phone connection and a teletype machine—basically a keyboard with a built-in printer. But these computers weren’t connected to one another, a shortcoming the U.S. government sought to overcome when it hired BBN Technologies, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company Tomlinson worked for, to help develop a network called Arpanet, forerunner of the Internet.
Tomlinson’s challenge was how to address a message created by one person and sent through Arpanet to someone at a different computer. The address needed an individual’s name, he reasoned, as well as the name of the computer, which might service many users. And the symbol separating those two address elements could not already be widely used in programs and operating systems, lest computers be confused.
Tomlinson’s eyes fell on @, poised above “P” on his Model 33 teletype. “I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much,” he told Smithsonian. “And there weren’t a lot of options—an exclamation point or a comma. I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn’t have made much sense.” Tomlinson chose @—“probably saving it from going the way of the ‘cent’ sign on computer keyboards,” he says. Using his naming system, he sent himself an e-mail, which traveled from one teletype in his room, through Arpanet, and back to a different teletype in his room.
Tomlinson, who still works at BBN, says he doesn’t remember what he wrote in that first e-mail. But that is fitting if, as Marshall McLuhan argued, “The medium is the message.” For with that message, the ancient @, once nearly obsolete, became the symbolic linchpin of a revolution in how humans connect.
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Comments (23)
There was a thing called the "each" symbol and it was drawn much like the "at" symbol but only with an "e" in the center. What you would do is draw your lowercase "e" then off of the tail of the e you would draw your circle counterclockwise back around to the bottom of the e. In Him, David.
Posted by David Ridge on January 26,2013 | 06:01 PM
@ used to mean 'approximately' or 'about.' I participated in an early use of phone lines connecting a computer to teletype machines when I worked at California School for the Deaf in Berkeley in the early 1970s. Someone at the Lawrence Hall of Science thought that method might allow Deaf people to communicate at a distance and staff members were allowed to try it.
Posted by Jan Collins on October 3,2012 | 09:55 AM
Actually, didn't Marshall McLuhan write, "The Medium is the Massage" rather than "Message"?
Posted by Kile Ozier on September 14,2012 | 08:41 PM
thanks
Posted by ann on September 11,2012 | 01:17 AM
Nice article - Just a couple of points... I think "Teletype" is a registered trademark. I believe that at that time, direct connection to computers was more common than 'phone company connections. The goal of the ARPAnet was not, btw, to connect programmers with each other but rather to make the resources on a computer available to programmers located at remote locations. Sending messages from one programmer to another was not quite an afterthought, as it facilitated this resource sharing, but is was not mentioned, I believe, in any of the original ARPAnet contract documents.
Posted by Paul W on September 8,2012 | 09:16 PM
What it's called is "CIRCA", the Latinate "at". My Latin is about 73 years back, but I'm pretty sure about the c and the a of circa. As such, I feel that it's one of the most apt acronyms ever designed.
Posted by O'Neil Poree on September 7,2012 | 06:20 PM
My keyboards on iOS devices have @ as it's own key. :)
Posted by Sam on September 6,2012 | 04:17 PM
In Hebrew, it's a strudel, for obvious reasons.
Posted by Susan Ferris on September 4,2012 | 04:53 PM
Groovy, that article is totally where it's at, man.
Posted by LouZha on September 4,2012 | 12:06 PM
I did a bit of research into the @ symbol for this review of a London restaurant which used the symbol in its name: http://bit.ly/TPFP_AS I found it odd that, given the format of Twitter names - @Name with no space between the symbol and the handle - they'd chosen a name for their business which could cause confusion. Just shows how the usage of a symbol can change over time as much as the use of some words.
Posted by Hugh Wright on September 4,2012 | 11:33 AM
The summer of 1969 when I was nine years old, my parents forced, uh, encouraged me to take a summer typing class, feeling it would be helpful in fourth grade and up. That was when I asked them what the "@" was for. I don't remember their answer. I thought it might come in handy for typing the symbols they used in place of cussing in comic books. Well, 43 years later I do use the "@" every day. I was never much of a typist, but I did become a writer!
Posted by Jeff Baker on September 3,2012 | 09:58 PM
In English it's called the "commercial a," as well as "curly a," though we all seem to have landed on "the at sign" as the standard.
Posted by Tracy on September 2,2012 | 01:03 PM
The @ symbol in Spanish stands for "arroba" which is a unit of weight close to 22 kg. Usually used for dry weights. Beef, cattle, sugar... I have no idea for how long it has been in common use but it is considered archaic.
Posted by Jose A Ramirez on August 30,2012 | 06:33 PM
So how many decades will go by before they give this symbol its own key on the keyboard?
Posted by J.W. Riley on August 29,2012 | 01:00 PM
Here is a short article on various names for the at sign in various languages. http://www.p22.com/terminal/atsign.html
Posted by Terry Wudenbachs on August 28,2012 | 08:36 PM
Another great example of the importance of private contractos in our economic world.
Posted by Jeffrey on August 25,2012 | 11:18 PM
At the risk of appearing dense, is there an accepted name of the symbol? Do keyboard makers just call it "the at sign" or is there another name?
Posted by Cris Morgante on August 25,2012 | 10:19 PM
But what is it called? the @? Surely it has a name!
Posted by c ritchey on August 25,2012 | 06:03 PM
Home is where you hang your @.
Posted by Michael A on August 23,2012 | 09:58 PM
Good post, T! Thanks.
Posted by Rick Lee on August 22,2012 | 08:51 PM
Well, nicely written article, yet for the symbol's history there is yet another theory, which of course is overlooked by most people because it goes down to a country too small and unimportant to the world... :(
Posted by Margarita on August 22,2012 | 04:16 PM
Excellent. Now, how do we get the sarcmark and the euro symbol added to keyboards?
Posted by Rick on August 21,2012 | 10:31 PM
Another great example of the importance of the US government in our economic world.
Posted by Joe on August 21,2012 | 03:52 PM