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The Secret Life of @
An icon of modernity, or a mysterious ancient symbol? That little squiggle has been used as a writer's shorthand for centuries -- but not how you'd guess.
by Bruno Giussani
First published in The Industry Standard Europe
11 January 2001
The precise birth date of e-mail is unknown. Technology historians set it somewhere in late 1971, when a 30-year-old American computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson, did what he unassumingly calls "a quick hack". He successfully sent the first electronic message to an account (his own account, in fact) on another computer.
Tomlinson is the man who picked the @ sign to separate the username from the hostname in the e-mail address syntax. Asked today why he chose that specific symbol, he answers simply: "I scanned the keyboard for a sign that wouldn't appear in anyone's name and couldn't therefore create any confusion." The symbol carried an appropriate meaning, being -- in English, at least -- the abbreviation for "at".
Thirty years later, the @ sign has become the ultimate contemporary pop icon; a sort of wallpaper on our daily communication space.
Dozens of companies and even some political parties have tried to hijack it -- together with the values of modernity, connectedness, smartness and speed that it embodies -- and to work the symbol into their own brands and names. The advertising industry, needless to say, is exploiting it everywhere.
Commercial uses aside, the @ sign is integral to the electronic identity of almost 400 million Internet users worldwide. Usage of the sign to replace or "enhance" current words is also spreading. "CU 8.30pm @ Bruno's" is the kind of short message often sent through mobile phones.
And in Spain, the @ sign is increasingly used among youngsters as a politically correct way of avoiding specifying gender, as in: "Hola, amig@s!"
Paradoxically, though, the origins of the iconically 1990s @ sign go way back - to the 15th century at least. There is even a possible genesis further back, in the Middle Ages, although this is still a matter of controversy among linguists and palaeographers. But first, a short diversion through some technicalities will explain why Tomlinson needed to put a separator in the e-mail address, and how he chose the @ sign.
At that time, he was employed by a research centre belonging to Bolt Beranek and Newman, a company located near Boston, Massachusetts, which had a government contract to work on the development of the Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. (He still works there, doing "pretty much the same job", he comments, although the firm is now part of GTE Internetworking.)
The early network in the 1970s spanned 15 locations, mostly universities and research centres. Tomlinson was familiar with the existing computer messaging systems, which had been developed in the mid-1960s. He had written one himself, called SNDMSG (short for "send message").
These programs allowed users sharing a mainframe computer to exchange electronic notes by posting them to designated "mailboxes" -- simple text files that had been assigned that role.
The set-up allowed the sender to add text at the bottom of an existing recipient's mailbox file without being able to read or delete the previous messages. The next time the recipient logged into that computer, he or she was notified ("You've got mail" was not invented by AOL) and could read the message.
E-mail had become a viable system, but it was still limited to a single computer. However, through Arpanet, researchers could transfer files between machines. So Tomlinson began tinkering with SNDMSG and some file-transfer software called CYPNET. He worked out that the latter could be adapted to transport messages and append them to a mailbox file situated in a different computer, much like SNDMSG would do locally. It only needed "a minor change in the protocol", he says.
In order for the messages to end up in the right mailbox on another machine on the Arpanet, Tomlinson had to devise a new address scheme that would identify not only recipients but also the computers where their mailboxes were located. Hence the need for a separator -- and his somewhat arbitrary choice of the @ sign. The first network e-mail address was tomlinson@bbn-tenexa (Tenex was the operating system that was used at Bolt Beranek). Domains -- ".com" or ".net" and the national suffixes such as ".fr" -- would not be introduced for several more years.
Tomlinson is remarkably modest about the whole thing. He doesn't remember the text of the first message he sent -- he probably just typed "test". "It never occurred to me that it could be something more than a practical way to make communication with the other researchers easier," he explains.
Yet his choice of the @ sign stirred one of the first online controversies. Tomlinson's design worked perfectly on Tenex, but there were rival operating systems used on Arpanet computers. Whenever the @ was entered on computers based on Multics, for example, it was interpreted as a command to "delete the current line", which made typing a network e-mail address impossible. This led to a hard-fought battle -- comparable to the more recent Mac-PC hostilities -- that was only resolved 10 years later with changes in the Multics software.
How did the @ sign end up on the computer keyboard in the first place? After all, before Tomlinson plumped for it, there was little real use for the symbol. We need to look back into history to find the answer to this question.
Berthold Ullman, an American scholar, put forward the idea 70 years ago that the @ sign was invented by monks when transcribing documents in the Middle Ages. He claimed they hit on it as a time-saving contraction of the Latin "ad", a common and versatile word that can mean "at", "towards", or "by". However, material evidence to substantiate this remains scant.
Until recently, the majority of linguists believed that the @ sign was of more recent origin, surfacing during the 18th century as a commercial symbol indicating the price per unit of a product, as in "5 apples @ 10 pence". A French researcher, Denis Muzerelle, thinks that it is the result of another twist in calligraphy, when the word "à", used by French and German merchants, began to be hastily written as @.
But last July another expert in the history of language, Giorgio Stabile of the University of Rome, produced Venetian commercial documents dating from around 1500 in which the @ sign appears as an icon representing another quantity signifier, the "anfora" or jar.
Stabile also found a Latin- Spanish dictionary of 1492 in which "anfora" is translated into "arroba", a measure of weight equal to about 12.5kg. The word comes probably from the Arabic "ar-roub", which, again, is used as a unit of measure, meaning "a quarter".
All this suggests that the @ sign existed from the 15th century on -- in both the Spanish-Arabic and the Graeco-Roman worlds -- as a commercial symbol used to indicate quantities of products, although it represented different magnitudes from region to region. This sheds some light on the presence of the "commercial a" in the first typewriter keyboards; it was included on Underwood's original model in 1885. It survived and was included in standard computing characters 80 years later.
The biggest frustration caused by the @ sign nowadays is how to pronounce it and what to call it -- in languages other than English. Spaniards and Portuguese still use "arroba", which the French have borrowed and turned into "arobase". Americans and Britons, of course, refer to the "at sign". Derivatives of that phrase are being imported into other languages, such as the German "at-Zeichen", the Estonian "ät-märk" and the Japanese "atto maak", or in the plain "at" form.
In most languages, however, the sign is described using a jumble of metaphors lifted from daily life. References to animals are the most common. The Dutch, Finnish, Germans, Hungarians, Poles and Africaaners see it as a monkey's tail. The snail -- in a paradoxical twist, because "snail mail" is slang for the slow postal alternative to speedy e-mail -- portrays the @ sign in French ("petit escargot") and Italian ("chiocciola"), and also in Hebrew, Korean and Esperanto ("heliko"). Meanwhile, the Danes and Swedes may call it "snabel-a" (the a with an elephant's trunk); the Hungarians a worm; the Norwegians a pig's tail; the Chinese a little mouse; and the Russians a dog. Food is also a rich source of names. Some Swedes favour the cinnamon bun ("kanelbulle"). The Czechs have been inspired by the rollmop herring ("zavinac") consumed in Prague's bars. Spaniards sometimes call it "ensaimada", which is a sort of sweet, spiral-shaped bagel typically made in Mallorca. And in Hebrew they use "shtrudl" (or "strudel"), as in the well-known pastry.
My firm favourite , though, is the Finnish "miukumauku", the "sign of the meow" -- probably inspired by a curled-up, sleeping cat.
| SIGN OF THE MONKEY TAIL |
| LANGUAGE | NAME | MEANING |
| Afrikaans | aapstert | monkey tail |
| Belarusian | sabaka | dog |
| Bulgarian | maimunsko-a | monkey-a |
| Catalan | arrova | (a unit of measure) |
| Chinese (Cantonese) | siu lo tsu | little mouse |
| Chinese (Mandarin) | xiao lao shu | little mouse |
| Czech | zavinac | rolled herring/rollmop |
| Dutch | apestaartje | monkey tail |
| English | at-sign | at-sign |
| Esperanto | heliko | snail |
| Estonian | ät-märk | at-sign |
| Finnish | apinanhäntä Kissanhäntä miukumauku | monkey tail cat's tail the sign of the meow |
| French | arobase petit escargot | (a unit of measure) small snail |
| German | at-Zeichen Klammeraffe | at-sign monkey tail |
| Hebrew | shablul strudel/shtrudl | snail roll-shaped bun |
| Hungarian | Kukac majomfarok | worm monkey tail |
| Italian | chiocciola | snail |
| Japanese | atto maak | at-sign |
| Korean | dalphaengi | snail |
| Norwegian | grisehale krullalpha | pig's tail the curly alpha sign |
| Poland | malpa | monkey tail |
| Portuese | arroba | (a unit of measure) |
| Romanian | arond | the a with a circle |
| Russian | sobachka | dog |
| Serbian, Macedonian | majmunce | little monkey |
| Spanish | arroba ensaimada | (a unit of measure) spiral-shaped bagel |
| Swedish | kanelbulle | cinnamon-roll |
| Swedush, Danish | snabel-a | the a with an elephant's trunk |
| Swiss-German | affenschwanz | monkey tail |
| Turkish | gul | rose |
| |
(copyright Bruno Giussani)
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