

The History of the "@" Symbol (Part 1) - edavis
http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-symbol-part-1-of-2/

======
cpr
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.

~~~
ugh
Obvious for you, maybe.

------
hammock
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>

~~~
nirvdrum
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?

~~~
jc123
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.

------
dredmorbius
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.

