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Dobbs | 2 years ago

I didn't think @ took on the "at" meaning until email came around.

discuss

order

johannes1234321|2 years ago

The oldest trace of @ being used to mean "at" can be traced to typeriters for commerce around 1880, where it was used as "5 apples @ 10 p" meaning "5 apples at 10 pence each."

At least that's what German Wikipedia Claims while the corresponding paragraph in english Wikipedia is short.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-Zeichen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign

d-lisp|2 years ago

French wikipedia traces the usage of @ to signify "à" (at) back to Renaissance !

gattilorenz|2 years ago

More recently (but still 1968, before email): "In ALGOL 68, the @ symbol is brief form of the at keyword; it is used to change the lower bound of an array. For example: arrayx[@88] refers to an array starting at index 88."

eesmith|2 years ago

RFC 20 shows "@" defined as "commercial at" in 1969. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc20.html . That was two years before Tomlinson used it for email addressing.

EDIT: "Creation of Computer Input in an Expanded Character Set" at https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ital/article/download/292... from 1968, p112, describes it simply as "at".

EDIT #2: "TRANSLATION FROM MONOTYPE TAPE TO GRADE 2 BRAILLE" at p83 of https://archive.org/details/researchbulletin05lesl/page/82/m... from 1964 describes that symbol as the '"at" sign'.

I think that is early enough to say that email did not influence the "at" meaning but rather the other way around.

aidenn0|2 years ago

There are claims it comes from the latin "ad" similar to how & comes from the latin "et" but the etymology is far less certain, with the french à being another possible source.

What I can't find is when it was first used in the US for indicating home-team for sports. E.g. [1] where there is vs. or @ depending on whether it is a home or away game. I suspect it's relatively modern, but not sure how far back it goes.

1: https://www.mlb.com/redsox/schedule/2023-09