There are a deal of inventions apparently formulate in the wrong time – the tin opener , for instance , was inventedalmost 50 yearsafter the cannister . The first facsimile machine wascreated in 1843 , and the @ symbolic representation was made almost five centuries before the conception of tag a famous person you do n’t wish and telling them that they suck .
Yes , the symbol most associated with e-mail was first used , as far as we cognise , way back in1536 , with others arguing that it date back even further to the6th or 7th Century . Far from mark Henry VIII in a very damnatory screw thread on the latest beheading , the symbolic representation was either first used to stand for " price per unit " or in pretty much the same way we practice it now .
One theory is that in the 6th or seventh Century , the symbol was created by otiose Monk . The estimate move that while copying sempiternal manuscript by hand , the Thelonious Sphere Monk look for shortcuts . One cutoff was condensing the Latin parole for " toward " or " at " ( ad ) into an " a " with the long back part of the " d " serve as the tail ( @ ) .
Another similar theory argue that French copyist first used it , swop the French word for “ at ” ( à ) , again to lay aside time and effort . Rather than take their penitentiary off the varlet , the scribes would idly complete the " a " , sweeping it up to form the " à " , ending in the " @ " symbol . In either scenario , the symbol means " at " , just like today .
Another possibility has grounds in the early documented utilization of the symbolic representation . In a varsity letter written by merchant Francesco Lapi in Florentine in 1536 , the symbolization was used as shorthand for " each at " relating to a trade ( e.g. 14 lemons @ $ 10 ) , mushing the a and the e together .
Eventually , this way of using the symbolic representation fell out of consumption – but the @ button get a line a revival thanks to electronic computer scientist Ray Tomlinson in 1971 .
Tomlinson was tasked with incur a path to charge mail between computers link to the Arpanet system , the precursor to the Internet . In solving the problem , he realized each mortal on the system would need an address comprising their name plus the name of the computer . In parliamentary procedure to separate out the two section of the computer address , he needed a symbolisation that was n’t used much in operating systems already .
“ I was mostly front for a symbolization that was n’t used much , ” hetold Smithsonianof the determination to choose the @ symbol . “ And there were n’t a lot of options – an exclamation head or a comma . I could have used an equal sign , but that would n’t have made much sense . ”
