The History of the "@" Symbol (Part 1) | Hacker News Reader

The History of the "@" Symbol (Part 1)

shadycharacters.co.uk

91 pointsedavis14 comments

I'm really not sure why the author is expending so much energy on the "@". It was the clearly obvious symbol for so-and-so at a given machine. What else could Tomlinson have used from the basic teletype character set?

And, as I commented to the author on Twitter, his story of how email came to be glosses over the low-level technical details that would interest at least the HN crowd. (I realize that's not the point of his story. But he touched on it, anyway.)

For example, in the pre-TCP era (NCP was the host-to-host protocol), email was delivered by FTP'ing to the given site and appending your message (saved as a file) to the user's publicly-accessible mail box file (which was usually append-only, so you couldn't read it).

We were pretty trusting in those days.

That meant your email name was your username on the site; for us TOPS-10 users, that means our email address was the usual 18+18 octal project/programmer number. I think mine was 377,6001@harv-10 (no domains in those days). The lucky guys on Tenex systems (the precursor to TOPS-20) and Multics, etc., had real names.

I also remember being on the first ARPAnet mailing list (1972?), which was, of course, a discussion group on mail clients' UX and mailing lists, combined. Talk about bike-shedding and flame wars! But of course, none of us had ever experienced anything like a mailing list before, so we had to discover all those issues ab initio.

Obvious for you, maybe.

Wow, not what I was expecting. Ten thousand words to tell a story of how the @ symbol was chosen for use in email, a story most of us could probably have guessed. I was expecting to learn the origin of the symbol itself.

Even the author seems to recognize a failure to address the origins, closing with:

How, though, how did the ‘@’ symbol find its way onto the keyboard of Ray Tomlinson’s ASR-33 teletype and so pass into internet history? Moreoever, where did it come from in the first place?

In case anyone is curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign

The story is definitely interesting enough (and also told well enough) for those ten thousand words and, as you seem to realize yourself, this is a two-part essay. What you want to be told will be told in the second part.

It’s one part of a two-part essay. I’m really unable to understand why you seem to believe that one part of a two-part issue should include everything you expect from the whole essay.

>To accuse the author of lying because of that is despicable and rude.

Either the OP edited their comment, or you are yourself somewhat off base -- I see no such accusation. And I see no evidence they realized this was a two part article.

The comment was edited. I now edited my own comment, too :-)

Can I ask you to delete your own comment? It wouldn’t be nice to have that sentence stick around, now that is no longer accurate.

I am unable to edit or delete any of my comments more than a few minutes old. I assume this goes in hand with the fact that I can't downvote folk either.

I was more surprised that at no point in the article is it referred to as an "ampersat." I was under the impression that was the name of the symbol. A quick Google search seems to indicate that's the case, too. But I'm far from a typography expert or symbologist. Does anyone know if that is the official name for the character?

'Official', in this context, can only mean 'sanctioned by a standards body', which isn't a deciding factor in how words actually get used in a living language.

In short, it's a word if it gets used as one.

English should come up with a word for this symbol. 'ampersat' is a funny derivation but seems reasonable given the other non-existent options. I once went on the radio show 'A Way With Words' and proposed 'atra': short and sounds good.

It's part 1 - explaining the history of why we use @. I suspect (the well trailered) part 2 might answer the history of the symbol itself.

I certainly couldn't have guessed the contents of this carefully researched and well written post. Maybe I'm just not in your 'most of us'.

Yes - it seems to have been there because it was a standard typewriter character, which forces the question, why was it a standard typewriter character?

Some people like to read an entertaining story. This guy is clearly combining his love of storytelling with his love of typography.

The part that stands out to me is this: "Half-fearing the wrath of his superiors were they to discover his pet project, Tomlinson initially kept his invention to himself. As a colleague recalled, “When he showed it to me […] he said, ‘Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.’”"

How many of you have stumbled onto something very cool and useful which was fairly emphatically not what you should have been working on at the time?

Hell, my entire technology career is an outgrowth of (mostly) playing on the campus UNIX servers while at university. To say nothing of a number of tools I've come up with.

The other observation is that email to G+, the killer apps are those which allow people to connect to other people through technology.

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