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Praying mantis! PM me!
Xoc: an excerpt on this history of the @ symbol:
It began life in the Middle Ages. Berthold L. Ullman says in Ancient Writing and Its Influence (1932) that this strudel-shaped sign was created by monks in the scriptoria as an abbreviation of the common Latin word "ad," which can mean, depending on the context, "to," "toward," "near" or "at." The monks wrote "a" and then curled part of the "d" around it. After a millennium or so, @ moved over into business as a way of indicating unit prices. In an account book or an invoice, people would write "5 men's belts @$1.20" or "10 lb. sugar @20 cents." I picture the people who used it sitting at rolltop desks and wearing sleeve garters.
It began appearing on typewriter keyboards in the 1880s, and soon after on the keyboards of linotype and other word-handling machines. It slowly fell from fashion in business during the first half of the 20th century, but never lost its place on the machines, apparently because no one thought of eliminating it. So it was still part of the teletype keyboard (used by telegraphy companies and news agencies) in the 1970s, when that keyboard was standard in computer labs and e-mail was invented.
The inventor, who is now a legend in computer circles but otherwise unknown, was a 30-year-old MIT graduate named Ray Tomlinson. This young engineer changed the way the world communicates, and inserted @ into all the languages of the world. He was just barely conscious that he might be doing something world-shaking. It seemed to him then, as it seems to him now, that every move he made was merely another detail in a long chain of inventions made by hundreds of engineers.
He was working in Cambridge, Mass., for Bolt Beranek & Newman, one of the computer companies assigned by the Pentagon to build what became the Internet. He was working on a way to transfer files among the 15 American computers linked to the network. He needed to indicate that a file was moving between computers rather than within just one, so he chose @: "I used the @ sign to indicate that the user was 'at' some other host rather than being local." His lab contained two computers, separately wired to the network, so in 1972 his first message went from one of the company's computers to the other, in the same room but via the network. He created the first e-mail address: tomlinson@bbn-tenexa.
Unfortunately, he didn't have the presence of mind or historical self-consciousness to send a message that we could quote for the next century or so. He certainly didn't imitate Samuel Morse, who in 1844 gave the opening of the telegraphy era a grand rhetorical flourish by transmitting, in dot-dash code, "What hath God wrought!" Alas, Tomlinson can't remember quite what his message said, but he thinks it was probably QWERTYUIOP, the top line of letters on the standard keyboard. (He sent it in capitals, which today would be considered rude.)
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