Why Did We Put @ Sign In Email? Who Invented Email? | Fun Facts

Описание: Have you ever wondered, why do we put the @ sign in our emails?
Where did the @ sign come from? Who was the first to put it in an email? and who invented email?

#EmailHistory #EmailInventor #FactsDrawn

I gotta say, for a character that’s so often used, the origins of the @ sign is quite unknown. I mean it’s such a random thing to do when you have a letter, and you circle around it, right?

Well...Whatever the origin of the @ sign is, we know more about its later usage, because, believe it or not, it DID have a usage before it became a standard key on our keyboards.

In recent history, the @ sign was being used as a unit in commerce, which meant “at the rate of”.

You’ve probably heard someone say this, when they’re giving you their email address:

Something like...John(At The Rate Of)Gmail.com...and that probably made you giggle inside.
Well...The truth is, they’re NOT ENTIRELY wrong.

You see...There was a time that the @ sign was used during trade and commerce, and it meant price per each unit.

For example, if you bought 2 chickens, it’ll be written as 2 Chickens @ 10 Dollars. That meant the chickens are 10 dollars each, Which, if my math skills are intact, equal to 20 dollars.

That being said, still the machine age wasn’t too kind to the @ sign. It took a long time for the @ sign to be used regularly.

So...What made us use the @sign in our emails?

The first few typewriters that were invented didn’t even have the @ sign at the keyboard. The character was quite unknown until 1971, when computer scientist, Ray Tomlinson, was facing a very interesting challenge:
How do we let people send messages by using their computers.

By the way, lets not forget that this was way before internet was made available to everyone worldwide.

In the email address, he needed to separate the name of the user, and the name of the computer that he was using.

He was looking for a character that wasn’t often used in names...You know, characters like comma or the exclamation mark.

After looking over his typewriter, he eventually chose the @ sign to separate the two.

By the way, what made him choose the @ sign instead of other characters?

Well...this is what he said: “I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much, 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.”

He sent a message to himself, from one machine, to another machine in the same room.

Tomlinson says he doesn’t remember what he wrote in that first email, and I guess we’ll never know.

He didn’t know it then...but the character would turn into one of the most used characters in the modern world.

On the left side of the address, you had the name of the user, and on the right side, you had the name of his computer. It also was an advantage that the @ sign signified the word "AT", and that was suitable for Tomlinson’s requirements.

That made it easy for the @ sign to be used in this manner.

For example, if we say “Send a message to [email protected]”, in lame terms, that meant send the message to someone named John, in a location called Gmail.

Yeah, I know it sounds dumb today, but hey, it made perfect sense back in the day.

Tomlinson had no idea that he was creating such an iconic character in the tech world.

He literally brought an dead character back to life, and made it into a symbol of technology.

And by the way, did you know that other languages have different names for the at sign?

In German, other than the real name, they also call it Affenschwanz, which literally means monkey tail, or in Hebrew, they call it Shablool, which means snail, or in Turkish, kulak, which means ear.

To check out other interesting fun facts and trivia, make sure you check out the rest of the channel.

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