Alfred Bester used it in "The Demolished Man" for the syllable "at" in the name @kins, so I knew what it meant. The book came out in 1953 and I would have read it in the mid-60s. I bet Tomlinson did too.
I remember it being used on lists of prices or shop ads....for example Bananas @.39cents/lb... Apples@.10cents/lb I believe it was on some typewriter keyboards for this purpose.
My earliest memory of the @ symbol is when I was a kid and I was learning BASIC with a Commodore 64C, back in the 80's. The @ key was at the right of the P key. 😀
as someone that grew up calling it "arroba" and that also knew the about the unit of weight, I was very surprised when I learned it was called "at" in English
Pretty lucky that @ managed to make it through to that one keyboard. During the early part of the digital age, we reached a point where all the symbols we had access to were the ones that they decided to put on that particular computer keyboard. Now we're starting to branch out again thanks to the fact that we're using touch devices and have access to Unicode and therefore basically every symbol ever. It's also another complete coincidence. I'm sure that it's above the two key on the keyboard, like "to".
Though even on desktop, things like Windows Alt-codes, Linux compose-key sequences, and international-layout dead keys, have been letting us type symbols that aren't on our keyboards for decades now. Not to mention programs like the Character Map, or Unicode reference docs online, that let us copy-and-paste these symbols.
It wasn’t just that keyboard. From my personal memories of using, in the 1960s, keypunches and accounting machines built in the 1930s or 1940s, and seeing both antique (WW-II surplus) 5-level Baudot coded Teletype machines (in the University ham shack) and 8-level ASCII coded Teletype machines (part of a PDP-5 system in a lab, and others), as well as manual typewriters from the 1940s and earlier, I know they all had @ signs on them, as did printed books (and thus, surely, Linotype machines). Except for keypunches and Teletypes, the @ was above the 2 on all the keyboards, and all the documentation said that the @ was the “commercial at” sign, used in reports for phrases like “50 widgets @ $2.00.” The kicker is that, in IBM keypunches and all the printing devices fed ultimately by them, there were TWO forms of the Hollerith code (and hence of the BCD code used in IBM systems): the original, or Commercial code, and the FORTRAN version, in which some codes (out of those with a 3-8 punch or a 4-8 punch optionally combined with a 12, 11, or 0 punch, so 16 characters in all) had different meanings, because FORTRAN and other programming languages needed characters not in the commercial code, and there was no room to expand the codes. In particular, the @ in the commercial code was represented by a 4-8 punch, but in FORTRAN code, the 4-8 was an apostrophe, which some languages (and later versions of FORTRAN) used as a quotation mark (both opening and closing). A number of other symbols, such as + = ( and ), also had to “overlay” codes used for other characters in the commercial. When they finally expanded the character set into EBCDIC for the System/360 in 1964, they made 4-8 the @, 5-8 the ‘, 6-8 the =, and 7-8 the “. So rest assured, the @ was not lost to oblivion, and every 8-level Teletype machine (the primary input device when the ARPANET was being built) had an @ on the P key. And so did every other keyboard typing device as well.
Before @-style email addresses came into use, in a corner of the 'net at that time there were UUCP-style addresses in use, that looked like this machine!user and if your machine couldn't reach that machine directly, you could use machine-you-can-reach!machine!user These were also referred to as 'bang paths', because ! was pronounced as 'bang'.
And you had to start it with a computer that hopefully everyone knew how to reach, like ucbvax at UC Berkeley or decvax at DEC. The much simpler @hostname became possible with DNS lookup.
And, "fun fact," it's still in the modern termcap database, so you could buy a brand new multimillion dollar AI accelerated supercomputer running Linux, and plug in a 1960's vintage TTY33 and it would work without too much trouble. The shell still supports the upper-case only mode for output to old teletype devices.
I know you did mention the name in Iberian languages in the past being arroba, but it's worth stressing that we STILL use that name (at least in Brazil), and the unit of measurement named arroba also still exists, though it's a hyper specific one meant to measure the weight of meat cattle
As I have stated in a previous video, I am an old git,. The "@" symbol has been a continuous part of my life, so has not been rescued from obscurity, and it was an important part of computing, even in 1971. o The _grocery_ paraphanalia of my maternal grandparents used the symbol. o At primary school we had arithmetic questions such as requiring the total of 27 @ £2 3s 6d (we'd also talk of things such as "oranges, 20 off", not "of" - that might be worthy of a future topic). "@" was vocalised "at". o At University from 1971 I used "@" in computer programming - it is part of the ASCII character set, and EBCDIC, but was not part of Baudot. It has _always_ been essential in computer programming. An example is MOV @1000, R0 ; move what is _at_ memory location 1000 to register 0. Youngsters seem to think they invented so many things, such as use of the @, torn jeans being fashionable, and sex, but, as Philip Larkin clearly stated, sexual intercourse began in 1963, and the @ has been with us forever.
@@frogandspanner Ok, in that case I can tell I'm outclassed in this matter. I only know more recent assemblers, higher level languages, math notation, and lambda calculus.
Exactly! Seems pretty strange to go to lengths saying how irrelevant and unused the sign was but then just accepting that someone actively designed a keyboard to have that sign be there. Especially at a time where every choice of what to put on a keyboard was probably very deliberate.
Probably because it was still a valid character on the computer system it was connected to. Many typewriters _did_ have @'s on them, since @ hadn't fallen _completely_ out of use in things like price lists (even if its use had been getting rarer over the years). Once typewriters started including things like &, %, $, ¢, #, ¼, ½ in the late 19th/early 20th century, it probably seemed natural to include @ too. Computers of the 1960s and early 70s were usually accessed through teletypewriter terminals (basically typewriters connected to phone lines or other dedicated communications wires), which naturally had typewriter-like keyboard layouts. And which symbols were in use informed what made it into character encoding standards like ASCII, EBCDIC, Baudot variations, and others -- which also informed what continued to be included on terminal keyboards. 7-bit (US) ASCII notably still included the @ sign (again, since it wasn't _completely_ out of use in the US when ASCII was developed in the '60s), but had dropped the ¢ sign* and the typewriter fraction characters (½, ¼)** for lack of space among the printable characters.*** Similar keyboard layouts were then used on "dumb terminals" (a monitor and a keyboard, connected to a phone line or serial cable that connected to the actual computer) and early desktop PCs. Meanwhile, the IBM Selectric typewriter was developed in the 1960s alongside all this, and its keyboard layout included all of 7-bit ASCII's printable characters. The Selectric layout -- including its symbol keys -- gradually became the standard US keyboard layout as other typewriter manufacturers copied its changes from previous US typewriter keyboards, especially which symbols were and weren't included. This also informed the IBM PC's keyboard layout, and the later IBM Model M keyboard's layout. The Model M layout -- and laptop manufacturers' later space-saving changes to it -- is still what most of North America uses on its computer keyboards to this day. * You could approximate a ¢ with [c]+[Backspace]+[/] (since this was getting overprinted on paper), or type "xx¢" as "$0.xx" instead. ** You could type any fraction with numbers and the [/] key. ***** ASCII also included a bunch of non-printable "control characters" used for teleprinting functions (like signaling to establish a connection or alert an operator, or moving the print cursor and paper around mid-message in the teletypewriter) which ate up 32-33 of the 128 possible codes. 26 capital letters, 26 lowercase letters, 10 numerals, and the common typographical symbols used up most of the rest.
Because it was included in the ASCII standard for teletype and computer communications. That's the missing link. I assume the commercial use of it to indicate a rate was the reason it got into ASCII, but it is mildly surprising since ASCII did not have a large number of special printing characters. (The other inclusion that always amazed me was the vertical bar, |, which of course led to its widespread use as a "pipe" character in Unix. Vertical bar is even more obscure than @: mathematicians like using it, but mathematicians use a lot of symbols that didn't make the ASCII short list.)
@men of @ had decided to name this sign, the 西回, as its origins lie in the west, and one of its names means whirpool, and 回 had a related character 亘 which is a whirpool and looked like a spiral[original form of 回] once, so it be named 'Western Return'.
in italian we call the @ sign "chiocciola", probably because it resembles the swirl on a snail shell, also one of the names for snails here is chiocciola, the other is lumaca.
When I studied bookkeeping in 1980, we didn't use yet the computer. But we didn't use a typewriter. We wrote everything by hand, because it goes faster than a typewriter. And we used the AT sign. In my opinion the typewriter was never much used for bookkeeping as it is not practical. And the AT sign has always been used in bookkeeping
An old use for the @ : Brother Jack @ High Point Monastery. When sending mail from monastery to monastery. Pretty much the same purpose as in modern E-mails.
I seem to recall learning that some Baltic/Eastern & Central European languages describe the '@' as whatever a 'rollmop' is in their respective languages, as that is a well-known delicacy that is wrapped around in that part of the world.
the Wikipedia article literally states that the commercial use is still contemporary. Your video makes it seem like the opposite is the case. The unicode encoding also refers to it as commercial at.
I'm fairly sure the old Imperial typewriter I used in the 70s (and it was probably from the 30s) had an @ sign, which I always understood even then to mean 'at'.
The @ masterspace was used on Univac computers in the sixties as a prefix to system commands, it is in the Fieldata charset (6 bit charset on a 36 bit computer)
Arroba is still widely used as weight measure in Brazil (and I suppose other countries with links to the Iberian peninsula), and all the available evidence supports it as the original source for the symbol. I was surprised you didn't dwell further into that.
But that earliest @ isn't actually an @ is it? It looks like it's a circled α, not a circled a... It could be argued that it is just an @ written with the greek script, so therefore and @, but since we distinguish alpha from aleph from a, I think we need to distinguish a circled alpha from a circled a as well.
By the time "@" was chosen for email, it was already in ASCII, so it's future was secure. What is really interesting to me is: when the characters to include in ASCII were chosen, what was the justification for "@" then?
ASCII is a character set from the early 1960s, designed as a standard for telecommunication, and they were chosen based on common occurrences in telegraphic and typewriter-generated communication. As @ was heavily linked to trade, it was included.
the old name (or one of them) in German was «Klammeraffe» from «Klammer» ("parenthesis; clasp") and «Affe» ("monkey, ape") i reckon the glyph in that Bulgarian text really isn't at all related though, cept for sort-of being based around (pun intended) the same(-ish) letter. the shape probably sprung up independently again later.
I heard on another video that Olivetti used this symbol on their typewriters and it got then tranferred on their computer keyboards and then after, used for the purpose you described.
I _really_ enjoy your content! If I would have a tiny gripe, it’d be the somewhat harsh edit (cut) between sentences - where you’d normally aspirate after the “•“ to start the next one… As a listener, there’s knowledge to ingest (that you have already) - and the few tenths of a second “breather” at a point makes your point (bad pun…) come across to me… I hope I’m not overreaching - maybe I’m just slow, but knowledge is worth our _time_ . Saving time (even milliseconds) is highly overrated in this world… 🙂
The common but unofficial Hebrew name for this symbol is Strudel, as it looks like a slice of rolled pastry. The official name is Cruchit, which would mean something like Wrappy. FYI, during my civil engineering training this symbol would mean 'every' so 1.3@25 would mean a 1.3 cm bar every 25 cm in reinforced concrete.
@ not on typewriters I'm pretty sure that's wrong because if you'd actually look at typewriters with shift function starting in the 1890s the @ and cent key at least it's been on all the typewriters i own and have seen
but it's was called and per-se and because that was the last thing you'd say when reciting the alphabet - x and y and z and per se and. per se was just added in because "and z and and" would have been confusing. What would "at per se at" mean? ampersat, not atpersat.
It is an AI voiceover. They just fed their script into an AI text to speech generator. This is an old text to speech voice named, "Daniel." It was used in old Garmin GPS navigator. The voice has just been pitched up.
Using "at" for just a bare username is an abomination. We should use ^ for usernames in things like chat apps, because it's a hat. People wear hats. People are not locations. @ should be used for chat rooms in chat apps, and topics should have eventually wound up being called "at tags." I'll die on this hill. I don't care that billions of people are wrong about this. They are still all wrong.
I would argue that if it has an @ then it's not a bare username as you put it. The @ means it refers to a location, in the internet sense. It just happens that the location has the same name as the username of its owner a lot of the time because that's convenient. Technically, people don't exist on the internet, only their addresses where information is to be sent. So in a way, people ARE locations on the internet. All of this is to say why I personally think it makes sense to use "at" in usernames
I remember the @ sign being available on my grandparents typewriter - I think it was an Olivetti model, maybe from the 1970s or 80s. They told me the meaning of it for commerce.
Dunno where you did your research but every typewriter I ever saw had an @ sign on it... And if it didn't how/why would a computer keyboard have one so as to enable anyone to use it for anything? Do you think he reinvented the keyboard to place an obscure ancient sign on it in the 70s? I think you (or whoever wrote your source) only saw small / toy typewriters
