Why is @ on your computer keyboard?

why is this symbol the at sign on your keyboard you may have heard the popularized story where in 1971 Ray Tomlinson was looking for a way to distinguish between users and hosts in his new designs for a network electronic Mail system a precursor to email and while this wasn't the first case of sending messages between computers Rey was the first person to use the at symbol to designate where the email was to go EG user at host.com many contemporary sources have repeatedly claimed that the at sign was almost doomed to be cast off from the keyboard due to its little use if it wasn't saved by the likes of Ray Tomlinson but I feel like that story leaves too many holes why was there an at sign on his keyboard to choose from anyways and what was its function in Computing up until then though Perhaps it is best explained by first understanding the origin of the at sign where did it come from and what was its primordial function at the heart of the at is quite literally an a the earliest recorded document containing something familiar to the at known to us today a comes from the Vatican archives in this Bulgarian translation of a Greek Chronicle written by constantinos Manassas in 1345 he ends his paper with the word amen featuring this stylized a the Mediterranean World began to use the circled a in a more symbolic sense in this 1448 letter from the kingdom of Castile to the kingdom of Aragon and this letter from the Florentine Merchant Francesco lapuin the at symbol is used to represent a unit of weight known as an Aruba a term barred from the Arabs that has been around since at least 1088 and which was in popular use up until the 19th century and as at would begin to spread around Continental Europe it also took on new meanings as seen in France where it was originally used in the same sense of a robot but by the 17th century came to represent the price of a unit of something as in one bottle of wine at four ducats so this was how the stylized a became at at least in reference to the commercial market and this use spread over from France to Sweden and England and even today this symbol is still known as the commercial at in the English-speaking World also note that this stylized a also held different meanings throughout Europe as in 1550 sadabnik of Ivan IV a collection of laws laid out by the Russian Monarch which uses at to signify 0.1 or in Italy and Germany where at was used to represent verses in court cases but these other meanings never found their way into English now up until this point in the west the written word was written handwritten but that was all changing with the spread of the Gutenberg printing press throughout Europe letters and other symbols which were up until this point in time written more or less according to tradition rather than rule suddenly had to become concrete or rather LED in their form in a sense one could call this the first encoding of a language taking all these forms of a letter and representing in a physical code so to speak and yes at does show up in these new typefaces created by printers it was physically encoded not only in type but also made its way onto commercial typewriters in the late 1800s as well even before the typewriter keyboard had been standardized to the QWERTY we English speakers know today it had already made itself at home usually sitting at the edge with some other commercial key like the cent sign and as electronic communications like the Telegraph and later teletype grew in popularity so did another phenomenon of the soon to be modern world the need to store and process the vast amounts of data that were being produced the Constitution of the United States mandates that a census must be conducted every 10 years to apportion congressional representation and as the nation grew the time it took to process all that data for the decennial census kept growing alongside it the 1880 census for example wasn't completed for seven years insert Hermann hallrith a man who had seen Punch Cards used by train conductors to represent data of passengers on tickets and thought that the system could also work for general information as well so he invented entered the electric tabulating machine which ran on Hollerith cards Punch Cards that hold the form of binary data as each cell can be either punched or not punched this machine greatly reduced the amount of time needed to complete the 1890 census and Hollerith went on to continue to develop his tabulating machines in 1911 hollerith's company along with four other similar data processing companies were Amalgamated in New York forming the new Computing tabulating recording company which later renamed itself in 1924 to International Business Machines IBM during the succeeding years IBM would continue to use hallrith Punch Cards which came to be called IBM cards to process data and by 1932 IBM expanded the original code devised by Hollerith into a set of 39 Graphics in cold and binary coded decimal interchange code with a notable absence of at these electric data processors were the precursors of the first general purpose computers the eniac binac and univac all of which used IBM cards to store data but in a time before screens and digital graphical output these computers would use teletypes as console output and eventually input as well and look at the teletypes these computers used look right there the at Key now this ad key couldn't be used for actual data input into these computers because it wasn't encoded into bcdic that was until IBM cemented at as part of computing history when in 1953 vcdic was expanded to include eight new characters taken from these teletype keyboards including the at sign now with a proper encoding ad began to be used not just as a commercial symbol but within different aspects of computing as well while IBM's Fortran of 1953 didn't include as a keyword it was used alongside four other characters to represent symbols in the programming language that weren't encoded yet at was used here to represent the single quote and later in 1960 was properly included in the lisp programming language to perform splice operations in 1963 the American Standards Association published their unified encoding scheme for the manufacturer consumer and general public this encoding was called the American Standard code for information interchange ASCII and write a position one zero zero zero zero zero zero sits at from this point on ascis included in almost every computer made and by extension at becomes more popular at was picked up by many programming languages of that decade and even today is still frequently used in a variety of contexts so when Ray Tomlinson went to search for a symbol on his keyboard that day it wasn't a stroke of Genius for him to choose at and he didn't save it from eradication the reason it was available for him to choose in the first place is because of its inclusion in ASCII so at would have been on your computer keyboard today regardless of whether email used it or not who was a part of ASCII bcdic and was integral to keyboards and typists since near the beginning it's the character with perhaps the richest and most unique history on the keyboard app a strange character for a strange world the at sign was the most obvious choice because we're talking about a user who was at some computer

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Keywords: at sign, at-sign, at

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Length: 7min 8sec (428 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023