It looks like a shell’s whorls or a spiral galaxy. This swirly symbol stands for “at” and can be drawn in one graceful motion. It started out in obscurity and then spun into ubiquity, thanks to email and Twitter.
The origins of @ are murky. Scholars credit either medieval monks or French scribes with creating the symbol as an abbreviation. It saved space and labor on handwritten documents.
Skipping ahead to 1536, a Florentine merchant wrote “@” to represent “amphorae,” or large clay jars full of wine. Later merchants used the symbol to mean “at the rate of,” such as “3 pounds of asparagus @ $2.99.”
Because early typewriters and punch-card tabulators did not include the symbol, it nearly disappeared. Happily, with the development of standardized keyboards for typewriters and later a standardized character set for computers, the @ symbol was saved.
In 1971, a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson worked for BBN Technologies. The U.S. government had contracted with BBN to create a network that would share information between computers. Tomlinson helped to develop ARPANET, a precursor of today’s Internet. He had to devise a way to address a message to someone at a different computer, using both the person’s name and the location of the computer. Tomlinson needed a symbol to separate those two elements, and to avoid confusion, the symbol had to be one not commonly used in computer programming. He looked at his keyboard and chose “@.” Since the symbol actually stood for “at,” people read email addresses as “Sue at XYZ.org,” which made intuitive sense.
The @ symbol has a proud history that spans centuries. And it’s fun to draw too.
The origins of @ are murky. Scholars credit either medieval monks or French scribes with creating the symbol as an abbreviation. It saved space and labor on handwritten documents.
Skipping ahead to 1536, a Florentine merchant wrote “@” to represent “amphorae,” or large clay jars full of wine. Later merchants used the symbol to mean “at the rate of,” such as “3 pounds of asparagus @ $2.99.”
Because early typewriters and punch-card tabulators did not include the symbol, it nearly disappeared. Happily, with the development of standardized keyboards for typewriters and later a standardized character set for computers, the @ symbol was saved.
In 1971, a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson worked for BBN Technologies. The U.S. government had contracted with BBN to create a network that would share information between computers. Tomlinson helped to develop ARPANET, a precursor of today’s Internet. He had to devise a way to address a message to someone at a different computer, using both the person’s name and the location of the computer. Tomlinson needed a symbol to separate those two elements, and to avoid confusion, the symbol had to be one not commonly used in computer programming. He looked at his keyboard and chose “@.” Since the symbol actually stood for “at,” people read email addresses as “Sue at XYZ.org,” which made intuitive sense.
The @ symbol has a proud history that spans centuries. And it’s fun to draw too.
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