History of the at sign

Ray needs to use a symbol that didn't appear in the names of the persons and that would serve to specify that the e-mail of that person was in a determinate domain, so the address daiatron[arroba]computableminds.com is saying that the e-mail of daiatron is in the domain called computableminds.com. Use the at sign was something totally normal due to its meaning and because was in the keyboard of the computer because they have inherited this sign from the typewriter machines.

Initially an enterprise called Digital used the symbol "::". After, IBM, thought that would be better use something more near to the human language as "at" and, finally, Ray Tomlinson, when he was programming the first e-mail client, called "SNDMSG", realized that already was an "at" in the keyboard. The first e-mail address was of Ray, and was tomlinson@bbn-tenexa, is that to say, tomlinson is in the machine bbn-tenexa.

The origin of this symbol is dates from the Middle Ages. Some scribes began to write the sign @ as substitute of the preposition "ad", that in Latín means "to" that later evolved to "at". The at sign also was used as measure unit and the merchants used it to replace the expression "at the price of".

If you visit the the Spanish version of this post, you will see that I don't have wrote the same, because in Spanish I do a critic about the use of the at sign to achieve gender neutrality in many Spanish words that ends with "-o" and "-a", using the @ as a wildcard that means "o" and "a" at the same time. Finally as curiosity in Spanish the at sign is called "arroba" (a name got it from Arabs).