In case it ever comes up in Trivial Pursuit, you might be interested in
the origins of the @ symbol, following the correspondence a few weeks
ago. The story is told in 'Where wizards stay up late', by Katie Hafner
and Matthew Lyon (Simon and Schuster, 1996 - but I bought it in the
USA), a very readable account of the history of the Internet, with an
emphasis on the people rather than the technology.
It dates back to July 1972, and the first email transfer between two
computers. Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman (the
company that built most of the hardware used in the initial Arpanet) was
looking for a message separator that would never appear in the name of
anyone in the world, and just decided on the spur of the moment to
choose the @ symbol from all the possible punctuation marks on his
terminal. No-one challenged this, and it became the de facto standard.
The adoption of this was not without problems, as the Multics operating
system, then quite common, used the @ symbol to denote that anything
before the symbol should be discarded.
Martin White
TFPL Ltd.
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