The Ubiquitous @

The funny little a with its tail circling back around it is probably one of the most commonly used symbols today. So it is truly amazing to learn that there is no official, universal name for it. The most accepted term, even in many other languages, is to call it the "at sign". but there are dozens of different words used to describe it. A lot of languages use words that associate the shape of the symbol with some type of animal. Some of these terms seem, in English and to our ears, pure whimsy

As an example, in Germany, the symbol is called. "Klammeraffe", or "spider monkey; in Italy and France, "chiocciola" or "escargot", respectively, or "snail" and, my personal favorite, the Hebrew term is "kruhit", a word whose other meaning is "strudel". I guess that beats the Hungarian, "hukac", which can be translated as worm or maggot!

The "@" was in use long ago. Generally, the symbol, pronounced as "at" was used in invoices for goods. Thus if one wished to purchase stuff or goods, the symbol indicated the cost of an individual item. For example, if one were to purchase six apples for $1.00 each, the order, might be written, "6 apples @ $1.00 each". It is still used in this manner on a variety of forms and invoices around the world.

But where did the symbol and meaning originate? In 1972, Ray Tomlinson, (about whom much later), chose the "@" symbol as a separator in e-mail addresses between different servers. But the funny "a" with the tail, has a longer history that that.

One story is that the "@" was invented by monks who painstakingly and carefully copied books and other writings before the invention of the printing press in the thirteenth century. Since every word has to be transcribed by hand for each individual copy of the book, the monks that performed the copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of individual strokes per word for common words. So, the word at became a single stroke of the pen as @ instead of three strokes. While it doesn't seem like much today, it made a huge difference to the men who spent their lives copying manuscripts!

Giorgio Stabile, a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University in Italy, claimed recently to have found evidence of its use in the records of Florentine merchants nearly 500 years ago. At that time, it was either a unit of weight or of volume, representing one amphora, a measure that was based on the capacity of the standard terracotta jars that were then used to transport grain and liquid about the Mediterranean (the capacity of an amphora was one thirtieth of a barrel). The sign was a handwritten letter A (for amphora), embellished in the typical Florentine script.

Back to Mr. Tomlinson.

Ray Tomlinson has been called the father of e-mail because, back in 1971, he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers.

He didn't invent e-mail itself. That had been around since the mid 1960's when folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a program to let the individual users of the institution's Compatible Timesharing System (CTSS) swap messages.

But that program only let people using one machine communicate with each other. Tomlinson made it possible to swap messages between machines in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans.

At the time Tomlinson was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern internet. He had been working on a program called SNDMSG, which, like that developed for CTSS, let all the users of one machine leave messages for each other. At the same time, he was refining a method of transferring files from one machine to another across a network. Putting the two together Mr. Tomlinson came up with the first e-mail program.

Just as important as the 200 lines of code that made up the e-mail software was his imaginative way of organizing the addresses of people and the computers that held their e-mail account.

The Model 33 Teletype keyboard connected to the computer Tomlinson was using only had about 12 punctuation characters. Out of this limited pool he chose the @ symbol which has since become an icon for the internet age.

The advantages of using this symbol are manifold. For a start, it makes mail addresses much easier to remember than any scheme based on large strings of numbers. Its separation of the person getting the mail from the machine they are using also helps organize the addressing scheme of the whole internet.

Mr. Tomlinson's e-mail address was tomlinson@bbn-tenexa. BBN was his employer, and Tenex the operating system used by machines at the company. The more familiar .com, .co.uk and so on came much later.

Tomlinson later said that the first e-mail message sent to himself using the "@" symbol was, probably, "QWERTYUIOP"! As a harbinger of a new epoch in communications this does not compare well with the first telegram which read: "What hath God wrought!"; or even with the "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you" uttered by Alexander Graham Bell over the first phone line.

Despite this, e-mail soon proved its worth and it swiftly became the most popular application on the fledgling net which, at that time, linked together computers at just 15 sites. Today, there are tens of millions of computers and e-mail is still the most popular application.

And we all can receive vital news, such as our winning of a foreign lottery, the pleas of a Nigerian national with $33 million waiting to be deposited in our personal bank accounts, the promise of enlarged body parts and so forth.