The Surprising Origin Of The 'At' Symbol

May 2024 · 1 minute read

As you can imagine, the at symbol being on nearly every manufactured keyboard means that it's been around for a long time. The first use of it on the internet was in 1971, according to Smithsonian Magazine. And it was all thanks to a computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson (pictured), who brought back the at symbol from the depths of irrelevance when he used it to send the very first email. From then on, the internet was changed forever.

The symbol had predated the internet but its presence on the '70s-era keyboard was gold for Tomlinson, who needed something to differentiate the email name and host addresses. He happened to land his eyes on this character symbol that hardly anyone was using at the time, and utilized it as a separator.

One of the first electric typewriters was the teletype. Tomlinson had the Model 33 version to send his historic message. Prior to that, most typing was done on typewriters. But with the advent of the teletype came the return of a symbol that was commonly used and left off of the traditional typewriter — the at symbol.

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