A History of the @ Character

Just because a thing works does not mean it will endure. Eight-track tapes worked. Nor is the use of a
thing destined to continue just because it works better. BETA VCR's worked better than VHS.

So, what is it about things like the common mouse trap, wire paper clips, even the Commodore 64,
which fosters continued use? Alternatives to each of these things have come and gone, and each of
these things currently have other options which are arguably better. Yet, use of the common mouse
trap, wire paper clip, and Commodore 64 endure.

The answer is simplicity. They work and they are simple to use. Indeed, what is simpler than the
common mouse trap? And it does the job. So it is with the wire paper clip, and the Commodore 64.

Another thing that has endured over time is the @ symbol. It is known as the commercial at sign in this
country. In other places it is called a monkey's tail, a snail, a little mouse, even an elephant's trunk.

The history of the @ symbol can be traced to the Middle Ages. Some point to the eighth century as the
time of its creation. The reasoning behind selecting the eighth century is because that is when another
previously unseen character came into existence: the question mark.

It is thought that the @ symbol came about as a result of efforts by scribes during that time to conserve
a scarce supply of parchment. They often squeezed letters like a and e, t and h, and others together to
save space. The @ character is a combination of the letters a and d. In Latin, ad means: to, toward,
near, or at. Instead of writing ad, the scribe penned the a and omitted the d by wrapping its upstroke
counterclockwise around the a.

Unlike many of the letter combinations of the day, the @ character stood for a complete word.
Furthermore, its various meanings allowed diverse use. These two attributes no doubt explain why @
survived while most of the other creative efforts of this nature did not. Besides being found scrawled on
numerous written documents from past centuries, mostly in reference to a given price per item, the
invention of the printing press carried @ onto the printed page.

It's not surprising, then, that the @ symbol also came to be on the typewriter keyboard. Strangely,
though, the first typewriters didn't have @ assigned to a key. And it's thought that this omission explains
why those machines were not very successful in the business world. Indeed, history suggests that it was
the addition of the @ symbol to the keyboard that made the typewriter commercially viable.

Even so, when printed commercial documents like invoices began to include columns for price per item,
the use of @ began to wane. For a time, in fact, about the only place the @ symbol appeared was in
string of characters to express expletives like !#$@%& as seen in comics. There is some indication that
this disuse prompted some typewriter manufactures to toy with the idea of removing the @ sign from
the keyboard. Just why it endured is a subject of conjecture. Maybe they were afraid of the commercial
power of @. After all, if its addition to the keyboard was the reason for the typewriter's success, it's
removal could cause its demise.

Whatever the reason, the presence of the @ sign on a Teletype keyboard is what gave rise to its use in
e-mail addresses. As the story goes, beginning use in the early 1970's of what became the internet
needed a way to separate the intended recipient's name from the computer's designation in order to
prevent confusion as the message traveled between the various computers making up the network. A
single unique character seemed to be the logical answer, and what better choice than the seldom used
@ symbol which meant "at."

Needless to say, this guaranteed the transition of @ from the typewriter keyboard to the computer
keyboard. Thus, the scrawl penned a long time ago to abbreviate the Latin "ad" once again
demonstrated its commercial power. And today, the @ symbol is responsible for delivering millions, if
not billions, of e-mail messages daily through cyberspace.

(From the Civic 64/128 Gazette, Oxnard/Ventura CA, April 2000)