
The story behind @ sign - alouanchi
https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/elephants-trunk-the-story-of-the-sign/p05tcymd
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eesmith
The video was too long for the information content.

Short version: the "@" symbol has been around for hundreds of years. It has
different names in different cultures. It wasn't on early typewriters but by
the 1889 it was. In the 1960s it became part of ASCII, and Ray Tomlinson used
it as a symbol for routing email to another computer.

BTW, they show the "@" on the 4 key. That's the British typewriter layout. The
US keyboard had a "$" on that position, and "@" was on the same key as ¢, to
the right of ";". (I believe ¢ disappeared in ASCII because it could be
composed as 'c' \+ '/'.)

~~~
enf
The cent sign didn't make it into ASCII because no one ever made a serious
proposal to include it, not through conscious exclusion.

ASCII-1963 did not have Backspace and therefore did not have character
composition. The concept of composing accents appeared in ASCII-1965, by which
time ¢ was already gone.

~~~
eesmith
Then I'm mixing up my 1960s technology. PLATO supported character composition,
and APL used it for operators like ⍋ (∆, backspace, ∣), so I assumed that
composition using backspace was a reasonably widely understood concept which
would have affected ASCII.

~~~
enf
I don't know why they were slow to embrace backspace. Maybe just because most
of the control character that did make it in came from Teletype's
requirements, but the Model 33 couldn't backspace so they didn't ask for that
one.

------
skerit
I didn't know it was also called "asperand". Seems like some variation of
"ampersand"

~~~
eesmith
I had never heard of it either.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign)

> The fact that there is no single word in English for the symbol has prompted
> some writers to use the French arobase[3] or Spanish and Portuguese arroba,
> or to coin new words such as asperand,[4] ampersat'[5] and strudel,[6] but
> none of these has achieved wide usage.

That Wikipedia entry start "ampersat", another term I hadn't heard of.

There's a lot of discussion on the talk page about the various names and
neologisms.

