origin of the symbol @

Origin of the symbol "@".

The arroba, this symbol that today is associated with Internet comes from the Latin, and more concretly of contracting the letters of the word AD, which it means "towards".

In the middle ages it was very fashionable to tie the contiguous letters of the same word. The letters 'to' and 'd' they were in the habit of being represented by his principal sly parts and the low right rabito of it "a" was ending getting up vertically, to resemble also the letter "d". ". With the time, the latter vertical feature was overturning towards the left side, of form similar to what would be the number 6 I dress in a mirror. Then, the final feature was lying down on the central part of the character, to end almost surrounding it and wrapping it in a kind of " whip spiral "

The arroba was a popular measure of weight and volume that had his origin in the Andalusia before the 16th century, when this Spanish region was influenced for equally by the Latin culture and the Muslim. In fact, the word comes from the Arab "AR-ROUB" or "AR-RUBA", which means four or fourth part, because four arrobas were forming the hundredweight.

Though it is supposed that this measure could be in use from many years before, it seems that the first documentation written on the arroba refers to the measurement of the goods that were transported in the transatlantic trips that were doing route between America and Seville. Already in that epoch the symbol was used @arroba “of goods. As "abbreviation" or sufficient written expression of the measure. Of equal way, the symbol was used also to indicate the unitary, and like that price the arroba was used to index the price of every measure”

During the 20th century, the use of this symbol was declining, and it could have provoked that also had disappeared of the typewriters.

It is very probable that the arroba had not come to the Internet age not to be for a masterstroke executed in 1971, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, in the offices of the computer company Bolt Beranek and Newman, a 30-year-old programmer called Ray Tomlinson analyzed the keyboard of his Model-33 Teletype. Tomlinson, pioneer of the programming e-mail, was looking for the only sign to separate a name of a place in order that the computers that direct the messages were not confusing the two.

It is as well as Tomlinson was the first person who used the sign in the cyberspace, sending messages of test from his computer, And this one being the first electronic address of the history: tomlinson@bbn-tenexa.

In Spanish "arroba" is said, but other languages use much more descriptive expressions, which refer to the final spiral or to his supposed similarity with the tail of some animal: this way, in Swedish "alpha - hose" is said (alfaslang); in Danish, " to - con-rama " (snabel - to); in Dutch "tail - de-mono" (apestaartje); in Frenchman, "snail" (scargot); in Italian, "shell" (chiocciola); in Norwegian, " bun spiral " (kanel-bolle), etc...