Short Stuff: The @ Symbol

at symbol and I love this stuff. This is These are the ones that are those uh nice little dinner party nuggets that you can whip out in right when you can eat dinner with humans. Again, that's not that's not obnoxious. It's not one of those that makes people roll their eyes. It's a little one where people go, oh, that's a really cool little nugget. Thank you for that. Give me an example of an obnoxious one. I know what you mean, but like, what is it? What it

could be an example? Because I know what you mean, but I can't put my finger on it. Do we have time? I know this is a short I don't. I can't think of a specific example, but it's also in the delivery too, and the one uh, the one way you're guaranteed to be obnoxious, as if someone says something kind of cool and you go, well, actually, and then say anything else. There's a life lesson from Chuck

right there. Never say well actually to any human so, um, that's true, or push your glasses up while you're saying that, right right, that's another two word combination that's awful, like canal well actually, well, actually, what we're talking about is the at symbol. And in America we have the most boring name for a symbol that's basically everywhere in the world that has a better name for it than in America, we just call it the symbol. It's really functional and functionary,

I think. So let's let's go around the world, Yeah we Chuck. Let's start off in Germany. Yes, if you go to Germany, you would call it the Klamarafa spider monkey. Sure, well, you have to say spider monkey in a German accent too, spider monkey. Uh. In Israel it's called a struddale because it does kind of look like a struddle a little bit. Um what about in Hungary. Well, in Hungary, you're gonna go with a ku kak, I don't know if it's a kuka. Let's go with that, it's a worm. It

sounds way more Hungarian. What about in in Norway? Norway it's a pigstail, which is a grizz hole. Yes, and then it's a ghoul or rose in Turkey. So everywhere, and in Spain it's called an a roba. And the reason that Spain is worth calling out, it's actually in the title of this house stuff Works article from ruse Um, is because they think that aroba is actually the oldest name for that symbol that we call the at symbol

in the entire world. That's right. Uh, if you go to Spain or any kind of Spanish speaking country now and you go to a market, let's say, you will see the sign called the aeroba, and it is depending on where you are, what Spanish speaking country you're in, um it is. It's a quantity. So if you go to Bolivia, let's say, and you want potatoes, you could get one aeroba of potatoes it's about a bushel, or

an aroba of oil is about three gallons. Okay, So now that you know that you can translate in aroba into absolutely anything you find in the market, right, I guess no. No, the answer is no, because, for some weird reason, in aroba of oil is about three gallons or some at each point three leaders, and aroba wine is over four gallons. It's fifteen point one. This makes zero sense at all. Yeah, I think you just have to know what product you're getting what an aeroba is

equivalent to. Yes, you do. And that's weird because measurements are meant to standardize things, and you standardized liquid or you standardized mass. But the Spanish said, no, we're not doing that. We're going our own way. Um, why don't you just have some of our delightful topics and stop complaining?

That's right? But Rus do then and got his hands on a book from Keith Houston or Houston Shady Characters colon the Secret Life of punctuation symbols and other type of graphical marks, And in that is a two part history of the AT symbol, where Mr Houston or Houston, I'm not sure which one it is. I'm going to Houston. I think George is the only place in the world that pronounces at Houston. Oh wait, no, that's what they

call that street in New York too, don't they. Yeah, you said Houston Street in New York, They're like, get a rope. Hey, is that at the corner of Houston and Avenue of the America's You know, I was referencing the famous Pace Picante commercial. Oh yeah, New York City, get a rope. So anyway, Greeks and Romans, Mr. Houston points out, were the first people that were trading these commodities uh in markets and using something called uh m for a as the measurement. It was the ceramic sort

of long necked ceramic jar. Yeah, with the two handles called an M sorry M for a. Yeah, that's plural, right, and I was about seven gallons. So that was Greece and Rome. Then the Spanish and Portuguese picked it up for their commodities, but they called it the aroba. They did,

but not at first. Apparently a roba comes from um the Arabic for al rub, which means one fourth or a quarter, and the ancient Portuguese and Spanish traders worked pretty closely with some of the Moors who lived in the area as well, and actually ran the place for about seven hundred years or more, get it or more, and so that the that Arabic rubbed off al rub rubbed off onto the Spanish and Portuguese. I don't know where all this word play is coming from. It's making

me panic a little bit. But the point is is in aroba did not necessarily stand in for amphora. It meant a quarter of something, or about twenty five pounds, and then eventually it's somehow made the switch over to be the same thing as an amphora, which again is that vessel that's used for storage but also a unit of measurement, usually a liquid measurement. And some researcher figured out that somewhere between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

and flora and arooba became synonymous with one another. That's right, and we're gonna take a little break and we'll tell you what all of this has to do with the AT symbol right after this. Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh man Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right, alrighty, So we've been talking a lot about these words that are units of measurement, But what has this all got to do with the AT sign, what

we call the AT sign uh. An Italian historian found this out in two thousand, a man named Giorgio Stabile. He's a professor of history in science or history of science at La Sapiens University in Rome, and he found a letter from fifty six that showed the AT symbol as used as a shorthand for amphora. Yeah, the guy there it is the first one. Yeah, the the guy who wrote the wrote the letter back in six, Francesco Loppy. He was describing an amphora of wine, but rather than

use the word amphora, he used the AT symbol. And it's like you're saying, as far as anybody can tell, that's it. That's the first use of that ever. And then the fact that um in Spain that this was the same thing as amphora. It shows that since we know that amphora and uh aroba or became interchangeable, then that we know that Aroba is the oldest known descriptor of what we call the AT symbol here in the States, that's right. And then here in the States, and we're

getting to how it became like twitter handle. Yeah, just wait, everybody, we'll get to it in part three of this episode. This is sort of a long one for a shorty, but that's right. Um. Here in the States, it became known as just shorthand for at the rate of something.

So if you were, uh, if you worked at a warehouse or whatever, and you're filling out your order form, you would say, I need a hundred tons of of whatever at this price per ton, and you would use that little AT symbol and they'll say, nice, try, We'll be telling you what price you're going to be paying. Uh. And that's sort of the way it was used in America and our commerce. It was just like, this is at the rate of this, and that's what this little

symbol means. And um, I mean that's basically what it's always meant in English, at least or in the United States. UM. And it still is use that, yeah, for sure, for sure. UM. We never used it to equate amphora or any kind of unit of measurement. It was just like you said, at the rate of um. But we typically tend to think of the AT symbol as a a keyboard key.

But it didn't make it onto keyboards as at least in the form of typewriters until I think the brown the turn of the nineteenth century, and typewriters have been around for a while before them, but they were not like the kind of keyboards that we understand now. They only had the letters are the numbers two through nine on them, all the letters of the alphabet, so they didn't have any room for any kind of fancy AT

symbol or anything like that. Yeah, the the dollar sign and the AT symbol came about, like you said, the end of the nineteenth century, and then in the nineteen fifties, the AT sign was made or I was added to the binary code decimal interchange code, the b C D I C, which were these forty eight characters that were printed on those punch cards, those early computer punch cards. Yeah, they used their word code twice in that I know,

binary coded decimal interchange code. So um so kind of made it's on trade into computing all the way back in the fifties, and then by nine sixty one IBM used it in its programming code. Uh, and it's one of its early supercomputers, the Stretch. UM. So from that moment on, the AS sign has always kind of been there hanging around, but it wasn't until ninety one when a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who was working UM with the Advanced Research Project Agencies, first stab at what would

become the Internet arponnet. That it became um the symbol that we know and love today, which is the thing the fulcrum that an email address moves up and down on. Oh man, I'd love that word up and down on on fulcrum. Fulcrum is pretty great, so great. So his job there was to write programs that we're going to run on this arponnet network. And he was connecting nineteen computers in nineteen seventy one, and the electron mail at

the time was basically it was very cute. It was basically a message that you could save on a computer and then opened later by a different person, but on that same computer, no one was sending anything at the time. It was like a digital post it basically, yeah, exactly. It would have probably been more efficient to just leave a post it was, but they were trying to electrify

or I guess digitize everything, right, it's electrifying. So he said, you know what, what would be really cool is if I could take this little digital post it note and actually send it across the room to that computer that I'm connected to. How can I do this? So, yeah, he figured out that there was a I don't know if an easy way to do it is the right way to put it. But one of the things that he had to to establish was how to identify one computer from another as far as you know, the protocol

was concerned. And so he came up with email addresses basically what we would call email addresses today. Um. And that he inserted the AT symbol basically for a couple of reasons. One, it already made sense as AT because it was at the rate of so AT's right there in the in the thing the symbol stands for. It's not like some big stretch of the imagination when you

see that. Yeah, he just meant that this computer to go to that one at at that one over there, or this user at this computer or something like that. And so Um. The other thing was that it hadn't really been used in any of the coding language that ARPA net was was based on, So it was kind of like a free symbol just hanging out there. And that's how AT got drafted into becoming one of the

most most used symbols in computer programming today. Yeah, he sent that very first test message to um what we think is the very first email address Tomlinson at BBN dash uh ten exa full stop. Right, you're waiting for dot something but dot EU. Yeah, they didn't need it at the time. I guess, so that's I mean, that's how they add symbol became so great, so so great. Love it, uh and I guess since Chuck said love it, that's it for short Stuff, which means short Stuff is out.

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