(iStock/Strange World)
Let’s start with the simplest: the @ or «at» exists to separate the username from the name of the provider where the email account is hosted. The big mystery is knowing why they chose @ for emails and not any other symbol. To resolve the issue, interviewed none other than the American Ray Tomlinson, the engineer who invented electronic mail in 1972. It was he who came up with the idea of using @ in the first addresses.
“I studied the keyboard and chose a symbol that was already there and not used in names. I found the @”, he says. On top of that, @ in English means at (the equivalent of our prepositions “in”, “na” or “no”), making the email address readable in a much more natural way. Just to give an example, an address like [email protected] can be understood as “Bill Gates at Microsoft company”. In Portuguese, as the @ does not have the same meaning as in English, the addresses sound a bit bizarre. Around here, the “at” indicates a measure of weight equivalent to 15 kilos – it is still widely used in agricultural products.
Weird or not, the fact is that the standardization of the @ caught on in such a way that today it is impossible to create an email account without the symbol. By the way, Tomlinson doesn’t remember the content of the first email he sent using the @. “The only thing I know is that the text was all caps,” he says.