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 rest is history, and if you want to read that history, you'll find it at Smithsonian. Here.
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.
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Tuesday, September 4, 2012
The Accidental History of the @ Symbol
The
symbol, @, that most younger people know only from email addresses and
Twitter, has a long history. Its medieval origin is a little fuzzy, but
there are several possible explanations of its birth. When I was young,
it was shorthand for "at," which always seemed silly to me, because why
abbreviate such a short word?
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