"Is it a Monkey, A Dog or a Cat? ...
@owlwings (43910)
Cambridge, England
March 7, 2016 1:21pm CST
... No, it's a symbol that tells you where you are at!"
Some people call it a monkey, some an elephant's trunk and in Russia it's known as a dog. I think that it looks most like a cat curled up asleep.
Before 1971, this symbol wasn't much used by most people, that is, until Ray Tomlinson decided that it would be a good symbol to use to separate a person's username from the name of the server at which they were logged on as a way of sending an electronic message by the new system which he had invented. We now call that system 'e-mail'.
It was mostly used in bills and accounts to mean 'each at the price of', such as:
"15 thingummyjigs @ $2.00 = $30.00"
In Spanish and Portuguese it was used to represent a unit of weight, the arroba, and that is what they call the symbol there. Other countries have different names but many now call it just 'at' or 'the at mark' or something similar.
It's sad that Ray Tomlinson, the person who gave us the @, died today. He was 74 and a little younger than me.
Do you have a name for that little squiggle in your language and what memories or incidents connected with it do you have? Perhaps you have used it in the wrong place at some time, with unexpected results"
23 people like this
19 responses
@Bluedoll (16773)
• Canada
8 Mar 16
Not taking anything away from Ray Tomlinson for he indeed was the first to implement the Arpanet system. What I find interesting is how any invention is always spring boarded from other work. In this case a method called packet switching had been worked on by a Donald Davies computer scientist who is also up in age now. 75 to be exact from what I've read.
2 people like this
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
8 Mar 16
It's quite true that he got his idea for his 'messaging system' after reading a proposal for a rather complex system, when he asked himself "Surely this can be done much more simply?" and so built his system and the Simple Message Transfer Protocol (now known as SMTP).
3 people like this
@antonbunot (11093)
• Calgary, Alberta
8 Mar 16
If I am not mistaken we used this symbol as a short for AND when I was in college. That was loooonnggg time ago!
2 people like this
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
8 Mar 16
@pgntwo Yes, it does. All of these symbols (including, of course, each letter of our alphabet) has a fascinating story to tell. I used to love Kipling's story of the alphabet when I was a child (though I knew it was fiction, of course, Best Beloved!)
2 people like this
@Letranknight2015 (51964)
• Philippines
7 Mar 16
that's sad, thanks to him we have this symbol for a reason now.
2 people like this
@AbbyGreenhill (45494)
• United States
7 Mar 16
I have cursed at it a few times, but I don't call it by name.
2 people like this
@pgntwo (22408)
• Derry, Northern Ireland
7 Mar 16
Simply, the "at" symbol, @. I thought Mr Tomlinson found an excellent use for it, much better than the previous Usenet method of using bangs, or plings or exclamation points and a chain of hosts...
...cuny!csvax!icvax!ed!cs!tardis!fizz
The username was way out at the right, and the chain of names was the logical steps, host to host...
2 people like this
@MarshaMusselman (38865)
• Midland, Michigan
6 Apr 16
I never gave it much thought on why or how that symbol began to be used with emails and other things. I didn't realize you were that much older than me either. I'll be sixty-four this coming July. I never heard it referred to as animals, in fact, I was about scratching my head at your title and image as I didn't put the two of them together.
Btw, I found this post on the side bar suggestions.
1 person likes this
@GrannyGee (3517)
• Louisburg, North Carolina
7 Mar 16
This was very interesting as I never thought about it ... I thought of it as the 'at sign' ... :)
1 person likes this
@Daljinder (23236)
• Bangalore, India
8 Mar 16
Uhhh.... I really have to look at the image closely to find monkey and elephant in there. I only found the cat.
We read that symbol as 'at' or 'at the rate'.
1 person likes this
@Hatley (163776)
• Garden Grove, California
9 Mar 16
arraghh ugh bad words makes me think of this @ArvindDixit grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr y uck ught at least the crook paid me before his ugly closing of b ubblews ugh
@Hatley (163776)
• Garden Grove, California
9 Mar 16
too in the curve is like a c,a in the at sign and stretching a lot the stem of the At sign is straght you have t i k now its a re al stretch lol lol
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
8 Mar 16
The '@' is different from the hash[tag] ('#'). The Americans call the '#' the pound sign because it was used to represent the pound (weight). I don't know if it is still used that way. I think that it's more usual to use 'lb'. I usually see it used to represent ordinal numbers or numbers from a sequence (as in 'Catalogue #356' meaning 'Number 356 in the catalogue').
1 person likes this
@Jessicalynnt (50523)
• Centralia, Missouri
7 Mar 16
@= at, lol, at least for for what I have known
1 person likes this
