This is a story about the little symbol that could. Many, many years ago, as Smithsonian Magazine tells us, the @ symbol wasn’t very popular. It was the ugly duckling of symbols.
The first typewriters, built in the mid-1800s, didn’t include @. Likewise, @ was not among the symbolic array of the earliest punch-card tabulating systems (first used in collecting and processing the 1890 U.S. census), which were precursors to computer programming.
In those distant days, the @ symbol still had a role to play–merchants used it for bookkeeping–but it was a small role. But the @ symbol didn’t give up. It worked hard. It dreamed big. Years passed. And then a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson came along. “Ray Tomlinson was facing a vexing problem: how to connect people who programmed computers with one another.” He needed a symbol.
Tomlinson’s eyes fell on @, poised above “P” on his Model 33 teletype. “I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much,” he told Smithsonian. “And there weren’t a lot of options—an exclamation point or a comma. I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn’t have made much sense.” Tomlinson chose @—“probably saving it from going the way of the ‘cent’ sign on computer keyboards,” he says. Using his naming system, he sent himself an e-mail, which traveled from one teletype in his room, through Arpanet, and back to a different teletype in his room.
And like that, the @ symbol chugged up the mountain of relevance and turned into a swan.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
