THE HISTORY OF @. I posted here about the names for @ in different languages (for example, in Greek, it’s a “duck”). William Allman had an article in the September Smithsonian about the history of @. The first documented use was in 1536 by a Florentine merchant who used it to denote amphorae of wine. It later came to be used by merchants in the familiar sense of “at the price of”, but was not included in the keyboards of the first typewriters built in the mid 1800’s. Allman has an interview with Ray Tomlinson, the computer scientist who, in 1971, first used @ in the address of a computer. He chose it, he says, because he was looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much for other computer purposes.
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