Yep, before using a computer, I learned in school that @ was the symbol for the weight unit called arroba, which if I recall correctly is equivalent to 100 pounds. It is cool to think that in Spanish we still keep the original meaning of many words and symbols.
Since you mentioned the cent sign... it's funny that it was cut in favour of @, despite having a much more obvious and common use... and in fact has all but died out as a result. I suppose the reason ¢ was excluded in the first place was that on a typewriter, you could make one with c-backspace-slash. So it never got a dedicated key, and therefore never made it into basic ascii...
It also doesn’t help that because of the ¢ sign’s obvious use, it wasn’t as easy to assign new uses to. The @ sign’s lack of an obvious use made it much easier to use as a symbol for whatever you needed.
And now cents are practically worth less. Really need to copy Scandinavian countries and make the dime the smallest denomination of the USD. Though current inflation, we're about ready for the dollar to be the smallest denomination of USD.
The first email system I used actually had "at" between the username and the host. But I'd used the @ symbol in paperwork for many years before that. It was a multiplication symbol symbol in 'commercial' use, e.g. (3 eggs @ 1 penny each = 3 pennies). The lack of that symbol would have held back the development of computing quite a lot.
I like the name "Asperand". I have no idea where it came from but I like it because it pays homage to its similarity to the "Ampersand" while still having a name that distinguishes it from that and that sounds cool.
I worked, briefly, in a sales office around 1978. We fulfilled orders for plastic bags: carrier bags, refuse sacks, etc. The invoices we sent out to customers always included the @ symbol before the price per unit (usually per thousand bags). When I first saw an email address, at university in the 80s, it seemed natural that the @ symbol should be used, because I was already familiar with it.
Came for a background little story, stayed for a well-done brief early computers history. Was shocked it's not some already established documentary channel! Great work! Cheers.
This video impresses upon me the technological changes I have lived through in my eighty years so far. In 1960 six weeks of my military training to be an aircraft weapons mechanic was dedicated to learning basic electricity. In the field in 1962, one of the new tools we used was an early, automated tester for aircraft and component electrical wiring. My introduction to digital, it was motivated by a five-by-eight punch code in Mylar tapes fed through an optical reader. As a civilian aircraft mechanic I leaned first vacuum tube and then solid-state electronics. The advent of computerized autopilot systems, digital radar and flight management and navigation systems in the early 1980s just about brought me up to date. Today, I call one of my daughters when I need help getting my iPhone to do what I need.
Fun fact. In the early days of the Internet in Finland we used to call the "@" symbol "miukumauku" due to its resemblance of a curled up cat. ("Miukua" and "maukua" both mean "to meow".) Haven't verified this so it might've been only the circle of people around me and it's fallen out of favor anyway. These days the symbol is pronounced "ät".
@@mskiptr In German it's also called "Klammeraffe", which could be translated as "clinging monkey" since it looks like the tail of one grabbing a branch
An interesting use of @ was done by spanish speakers. Most words in spanish have a gender (street is femenine and tree is masculine). Then there's "everyone". "Todas" is explicitly feminine, so it's only used when "everyone" is female. "Todos" is masculine and can be used for male or mixed groups. However, some people liked to text "tod@s", since @ looks like an a and an o. It was mostly so you didn't have to type "todos y todas" while still taking girls into account. Nowadays most people replaced the @ with e, so they say and text "todes". Using e has a political tone to it, while using @ did not.
As an English speaker learning Spanish in the age of "tod@s", before the "e" came into practice, I felt the political undertone. I always felt it was stupid, as "todos" is already inclusive. Just as "man" once was in English. We are all "men". That is our species.
@@DestopLine some people do, but as he said, it has the political implication of being 'inclusive' in the modern sense. I've seen it more often spoken than written though.
This is honestly well done. The editing, documentation, script, your presentation of them, it’s almost on par with popular related RUclipsrs today. Keep going! You’re doing great.
@@roxaskinghearts nah, the thumb is just completing the title, since the whole video could be clickbait by having a title like this and then everything the video says is "because of emails!". It's a great way to introduce you to the topic, many well-written articles and even academic researches follow this style
@@samueleproiettimicozzi8134 yeah its called click bait liars deserve no respect o yeah i get it everyone els is so easy to fool with nonsense like this and would overlook it or say nothing about it see for someone to claim politician they have to understand nuance of our society today and how it is ran not children who sit there and defend their own idiosyncrasies and i get it im just calling it as i see it
In the Netherlands(dutch), the symbol "@" is referred to as the "apenstaartje," which translates to "monkey's tail." The name "apenstaartje" is derived from the word "aap" meaning monkey, and "staart" meaning tail. Therefore, when combined, it represents the tail of a monkey.
As someone who collects typewriters (owning some from 1912 to the 1970s, Including 2 underwood typewriters identical to the one shown in this video), I've often wondered why there's an @ symbol. Thanks for clearing it up.
I was wondering why this was on my 1959 (?) vintage typewriter, this clears it up. Playing with an old typewriter has offered a lot of insight into the design and function of modern keyboards, answered a lot of questions I'd never thought to ask about why they are the way they are. "Caps Lock" evolved from "Shift Lock," which mechanically locked the shift button down, the shift key physically shifting the entire assembly down to use different characters on the type bar (the name doesn't make much sense in modern context but makes sense given this). The "QWERTY" layout isn't to make people type slower as often said, but to have it so that most of the time letters from left and right alternate to prevent the type bars colliding - the one oversight is the proximity of "T" and "H," those are too close together and jam on a regular basis.
@@InkboxSoftware Interesting - I wonder how similar early computer keyboards looked to typewriters? Though of course later typewriters, especially electronic ones, looked a lot more like computer keyboards than the earlier typewriters that we all visualize. One interesting comparison between the modern "Caps Lock" and typewriter/early computer "Shift Lock" is that Caps Lock only applies to letters, has no effect on other characters: ABC123, while shift lock would give the secondary character for all keys: ABC!@# While writing that, I thought of yet another interesting thing - on modern keyboard the 1 key doubles as "!". My 1959(?) vintage Smith Corona mechanical typewriter has neither of those characters, presumably using "l" for "1" and ' [backspace] . for "!" This perhaps explains why modern keyboards, needing to add both, have "1" and "!" as the same key, the others unchanged.
@@quillmaurer6563Exclamation point was, to my knowledge, printed as apostrophe + period. On typewriters as well as in ASCII, the apostrophe was straight instead of curly (like the ones that MS Word replace your boring ASCII quotes with).
@@cmyk8964 Yes, that's correct for the exclamation point. To be more exact with how that works technically is you type the apostrophe, then hit the backspace, and then finally type the period. The reason for the backspace is because each time you type a key on the typewriter, the carriage advances one space forward. On a vintage mechanical typewriter, the backspace was not a "delete the previous character" as it is today in digital keyboards, but instead, moved your current position back one space. Source: I own a vintage Royal typewriter from 1959
I think another interesting use from the @ sign is in aviation. In the days that ATC was done using purely pen and paper the @ symbol was the go to symbol for "at and maintain". It's still used to this day. Not an origin story by any means but an interesting side note.
this video made me remember that @ in swedish is actually pronounced "snabel-a" which literally means trunk-a (as in the trunks elephants have) but I haven't heard basically anyone call @ that in years. I guess "at" is 2 fewer syllables than "snabel-a" so its a lot easier to just call it the English "at" especially when @ comes up everywhere nowdays. idk thats fascinating to me, not only has the choice to use @ in email addresses affected the internet but also how people use language
As a programmer, I use the @ symbol to create commands for bug testing. Mostly because it's so easy to find when combing through thousands of lines of code.
I have heard many people call it "at the rate" and I never questioned it until now. Makes a lot more sense in the commercial world, especially the example of France you gave.
Well done. As a boomer who didn't get his first computer until age 39, I still remain gobsmacked at the fingertip availability of the sum of humanity's knowledge down to the most granular level. In your pocket.
Funny to note that the @ sign in French is called "Arobase" (pronounced ah-rho-baz) which sounds like it comes from that unit of measurement you mentioned in the video.
In Norwegian its called "Alfakrøll" the direct translation to English would be "alphacurl" or "alpha curl". Alpha is the unit of one, we also used it in the comercial space.
The reveal of IBM got me shocked, it's always a great thing to discover the beginning of very important names like the big companies that changed the world back then. You've got a new sub man, love your content
Another big reason the @ symbol stuck around is because it was used in some assembly instruction sets to modify the addressing mode for registers, essentially telling the computer, “the value here isnt just a value, its a location in memory”. This is also probably part of the reasoning for making the @ symbol standard for email addressing.
Just one small correction: Just because a character is in ASCII doesn't mean it will have a key on all keyboard layouts. There are plenty of computers with more limited keyboards and (for PCs) keyboard layouts that e.g. don't include ^, ~ or `. So @ could have easily been dropped if there was no common use and available key for it. There are only 47 character-producing keys on a PC keyboard afterall. Those plus space are 95 different characters, exactly the same number as ASCII has printable characters. Including any additional character (e.g. § ¶ ◄ µ € ² ³) would kick one of those off.
Every computer from about the 1970s/80s onwards supports ASCII, except old IBM mainframes and other mainframes that wanted to be compatible with them. Certainly ASCII support has always been universal among microprocessor-based computers, as well as “minicomputers” from the like of DEC, DG and others. And of course if a computer was going to run a Unix OS, then ASCII support was a requirement.
I'm really curious to see what these keyboards are that redefine what's above 6, because anything doing this would be out of spec with USB HID, in addition to breaking keyboard layout standards on the PC that have existed long before USB. What's on the keyboard are the printable 7-bit ASCII characters which are the original definition, the 8 bit characters didn't come until much later. International keyboards do that and more (like the euro symbol) with AltGr.
The thing I've never understood is why US PC keyboards moved the @ sign to 2, replacing " which was previously on that key on typewriters and early computers. Even its position in ASCII is due to its position on the keyboard when the shift key just used to XOR the key value with 0x20. A lot of Asian countries followed the position on US keyboards, but most of Europe including the UK stuck with the traditional positions. They question is why did anyone move it at all? The earliest "old" computers (that I can find pictures of) with @ on 2 seem to be DEC (VT52 and VT100 onwards) and obviously the IBM PC. But many other common terminals such as the adm-3a had " on 2. Did IBM copy DEC and if so why did DEC move it? The VT52 (1974) has @ on 2, but the older VT05 (1970) has " on 2.
That bugs the shit out of me, every few years I'll come across an OS where the input is set to US English and typing any command featuring an @ gets screwed up, leading me to scratch my head for a moment or two until I remember to use SHIFT-2 for it.
So as others mention how this symbol is called in their languages, in Russian it's called "sobaka", literally translating as "dog". Somehow unlike finnish people, it appeared to look like a curled up dog instead of a cat here and a bit resembling bark being called "at" in English XD
Considering that, if this video is correct, the @ sign appeared in Cyrillic long time ago, I wonder how it got into Slavic languages with all weird names. But it's not only about Slavic as it seems, many many languages have weird names. In Belarusian and Ukrainian it's a Snail, as well as in... Italian. In Ukrainian it's also a puppy. Bulgarian and Polish think it's a monkey. Turkic languages went crazy too: Kazakh -- Moon's ear, Turkish - meat (?), Uzbek - puppy again! Tatar - dog, but I guess it's Russian influence. Almost like the symbol came from nowhere and everyone invented their own names. I guess that's because it's not a letter really, not a word, but just it, a symbol.
and despite at-sign being non-existant in Soviet Union before appearance of desktops, nobody really knows why is it called dog. I like to say 'commercial at' is borrowed from Tatar et/эт - dog, cause why not
Your picture of the PDP-10 (KA10) computer is all the reason needed for @ to stick around, it is used for indirect addressing in MACRO-10 assembly language. Unfortunately, the back arrow character was removed in 1967 but we adapted by switching to the less descriptive "=", and replacing back arrow with "_" in ASCII was an improvement, and at that time lower case was not commonly available so there were few other candidates for removal.
Early ASCII had “↑” which was replaced with “^”, and “←” which was replaced with “_”. DEC’s assemblers for both PDP-10 and PDP-11 families used “@” for indirect addressing modes. The 18-bit and 12-bit machines, being simpler, just put an “I” modifier in the instruction.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 And for some reason, Commodore stuck with those left-facing and upward-facing arrows for characters 95 and 94, respectively, on their 8-bit computers. And early versions of Microsoft BASIC (not the Commodore version) used character 95 (left-arrow, which became underscore) for character delete, and "@" for line delete.
I've always liked the at symbol, and it never made sense that in C and languages based on it that they went with ampersand to indicate address of. I guess if e-mail had become popular before C was designed that it would be the other way around, but for my own language I decided to break from the convention that C uses and instead use the at symbol for my address of operator. I think this video vindicates my choice.
@ would be the perfect choice for dereferencing operator more then the address of operator in my opinion. If we had a pointer p, we could look what at the address p points to with @p instead of *p. This would also maybe clear some confusion with using * to declare pointers and also to dereference them which are unrelated.
@@Kycilak I don't disagree that it is confusing to use the same symbol to declare a pointer and dereference it, but I'd actually rather not use @ for dereferencing, and instead look to a new symbol, such as $. Consider that what dereferencing really is, is acquiring the value at that address. Obviously using such a symbol would be a bit fraught, but for internationalization of my language it could be possible to use any country's currency symbol.
@@anon_y_mousse - My suspicion is the primary reason for PERL to have been discarded is because they used $ to dereference, probably the ugliest character possible.
@@jrstf Except that it didn't use it to dereference, but rather to denote that it was a variable, period. Using it for literally every manipulation of a variable is certainly tiresome.
My understanding is the @ symbol on typewriters in England came from commercial usage, where in a list of prices you could have ten items priced at 9 pence, 10@9p=90pence.
The # symbol is originally known as the octothorpe symbol. In more modern times, it's become known as the hash mark, number sign, and pound sign. I personally refuse to call it a 'hashtag', as it's blasphemy upon the origins of the symbol. It's an octothorpe, look it up.
@@southernflatland I am aware of its origins as being interchangeable with ℔ which is how it earned the name "pound sign" in the first place and how it used to be known as the "number sign" for its use with competition placement designations and numerical designations but most people aren't aware. Not to mention its use in voicemail systems. Also it has historically been known as a "hash" and "hash sign" as well. Also "sharp" because it resembles ♯ , hex in Singapore and Malaysia and square. which is actually ⌗ and not # . There's a whole bunch of other slang terms for it too.
@@southernflatlandot called hash It's called sharp I call it hash tho No one wants to say a mouthful of a word every time they refer to this symbol No ones really gonna understand what an octothorpe is anyway
@@RenderingUser I'm fine with calling it the 'pound' symbol, that's what I originally learned it as anyways. It's one syllable anyways. Like who the hell decided to change and complicate that into the two syllable form 'hashtag' anyways? Changing words to more complicated words (more syllables) for no good reason makes absolutely no sense.
At 6:49, there is a spoken and visual error: "@ was in ASCII and BCDIC" and both those acronymical words are displayed. However, as the presenter said earlier, @ was not included in BCDIC; it was added during the creation of Extended BCDIC (acronym for which was and still is EBCDIC and spoken within the trade as "EbbSeDick").
I previously wondered about the origin of the symbol and was satisfied to discover that before computers it was used in commercial notation, which explained to me why it arrived on computer keyboards. I didn't know about the unit of measure, but I do know that in Spanish (at least Salvadoran Spanish), the symbol is still called "arroba". I'm not sure I fully agree with the conclusion that it would still be on standard keyboards without email just because it was included in ASCII. As computers became more general use, it could have easily been replaced with something more relevant to general users, like if somebody developing keyboard layouts decided that the common user was more interested in taking about temperatures than about commodity trades and it caught on, we could have had a world where ° replaced @ before someone invented the user@server scheme. What was on keyboards dictated what went into ASCII, ASCII doesn't dictate what's on keyboards.
There was one on my old VIC 20 keyboard too, but there was also an English pound sign. Both had little use for me back then, They carried over to the Commodore 64, which uses an identical keyboard. Also the Commodore 128 had them too, and that's when I actually started using @ because I first started to use the internet with the Commodore 128D accessing a shell account at the University through a 1200 Bps modem.
The Commodores used their own encoding system called PETSCII. It had the @ symbol because PETSCII borrowed heavily from the first version of ASCII, which had no lower-case characters but did have an @ symbol.
The idea that some people think @ was invented for email doesn't surprise me as there are younger people today who think # is called hashtag and was invented for social media..!
Interesting that you mention @ being used to mean versus. It kind of does in US sports like basketball where you'll see matches advertised on TV as Team A @ Team B, I'm sure they actually mean "at" literally, but it's kind of funny how things come back around.
On UK keyboard layout the @ symbol is still in the original place it was on ancient type writers, near the shift key. USA must have decided they wanted to be different again for some reason.
I was taught it was the "each" symbol, as the "a" is inside an outer "e". It was used the same as "at", but would say - 10 units "each" $23 = I'm happy to be re-informed and corrected from your video!
I don't think you're wrong. In English, the @ was used on store signage to mean 'each at'. It's an 'a' inside a stylized 'e'. This to differentiate from a group price. Say you had a stack of four tires on display, with a sign saying $6. This could be understand that the tires were four for $6. But if the sign says @$6, then four tires was $24. Whether there was an obscure latinate usage meaning 100 pounds, it was functionally used to mean 'each at' in American commercial environments, the primary place where computers were first created. I've had this argument with people for years, that even pronouncing it as the 'at' symbol is not correct. but you know . . . .lost that argument. :-)
In Cyrillic layout, it's " brackets above 2, not @. Of course the key was not going anywhere as it's uppercase number instead of separate button like Windows key that doesn't exist on older keyboards. So yeah it wasn't going anywhere at most the default layout would have changed to a more used diactric mark or something.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
It’s severely uncanny seeing “@“ within old texts.
Yep, before using a computer, I learned in school that @ was the symbol for the weight unit called arroba, which if I recall correctly is equivalent to 100 pounds. It is cool to think that in Spanish we still keep the original meaning of many words and symbols.
Moor's heritage
They teach that in school...?
Yes, about 50 years ago arroba was still very used in rural Mexico
In Portugal cork is still measured and traded in arroba, witch is just under 15kg /33 pounds
This is true. But surely this is not why it was introduced on the keyboard.
Since you mentioned the cent sign... it's funny that it was cut in favour of @, despite having a much more obvious and common use... and in fact has all but died out as a result.
I suppose the reason ¢ was excluded in the first place was that on a typewriter, you could make one with c-backspace-slash. So it never got a dedicated key, and therefore never made it into basic ascii...
It also doesn’t help that because of the ¢ sign’s obvious use, it wasn’t as easy to assign new uses to. The @ sign’s lack of an obvious use made it much easier to use as a symbol for whatever you needed.
#JusticeForCent
And now cents are practically worth less. Really need to copy Scandinavian countries and make the dime the smallest denomination of the USD. Though current inflation, we're about ready for the dollar to be the smallest denomination of USD.
plus you can always just do $0.01 as opposed to 1¢, for example, if you really needed a cent value for whatever reason.
@@0011peace I’m not saying reusing symbols didn’t happen, just that it wasn’t preferable.
The first email system I used actually had "at" between the username and the host. But I'd used the @ symbol in paperwork for many years before that. It was a multiplication symbol symbol in 'commercial' use, e.g. (3 eggs @ 1 penny each = 3 pennies). The lack of that symbol would have held back the development of computing quite a lot.
In Portuguese @ is still called arroba.
Spanish too!
In Spain too.
I like the name "Asperand". I have no idea where it came from but I like it because it pays homage to its similarity to the "Ampersand" while still having a name that distinguishes it from that and that sounds cool.
Then again, that means that "Arroba" is its historical name. So maybe that should be the name in English?
@@Collidedatoms Nah, language is always evolving and we use @ in a completely different way today.
I worked, briefly, in a sales office around 1978. We fulfilled orders for plastic bags: carrier bags, refuse sacks, etc. The invoices we sent out to customers always included the @ symbol before the price per unit (usually per thousand bags). When I first saw an email address, at university in the 80s, it seemed natural that the @ symbol should be used, because I was already familiar with it.
Came for a background little story, stayed for a well-done brief early computers history.
Was shocked it's not some already established documentary channel!
Great work! Cheers.
This video impresses upon me the technological changes I have lived through in my eighty years so far. In 1960 six weeks of my military training to be an aircraft weapons mechanic was dedicated to learning basic electricity. In the field in 1962, one of the new tools we used was an early, automated tester for aircraft and component electrical wiring. My introduction to digital, it was motivated by a five-by-eight punch code in Mylar tapes fed through an optical reader. As a civilian aircraft mechanic I leaned first vacuum tube and then solid-state electronics. The advent of computerized autopilot systems, digital radar and flight management and navigation systems in the early 1980s just about brought me up to date. Today, I call one of my daughters when I need help getting my iPhone to do what I need.
Fun fact. In the early days of the Internet in Finland we used to call the "@" symbol "miukumauku" due to its resemblance of a curled up cat. ("Miukua" and "maukua" both mean "to meow".) Haven't verified this so it might've been only the circle of people around me and it's fallen out of favor anyway. These days the symbol is pronounced "ät".
In contemporary times in Israel the @ symbol is called "strudel" (as in the pastry) when reciting e-mail addresses.
Here in Poland it's called "małpa", meaning a monkey.
@@mskiptr In German it's also called "Klammeraffe", which could be translated as "clinging monkey" since it looks like the tail of one grabbing a branch
it’s called a dog in russian
In Czech it's called a "zavináč", coming from the verb "vinout se", which means to curl around. Zavináč is also the name of a pickled fish though
An interesting use of @ was done by spanish speakers.
Most words in spanish have a gender (street is femenine and tree is masculine).
Then there's "everyone". "Todas" is explicitly feminine, so it's only used when "everyone" is female. "Todos" is masculine and can be used for male or mixed groups.
However, some people liked to text "tod@s", since @ looks like an a and an o. It was mostly so you didn't have to type "todos y todas" while still taking girls into account.
Nowadays most people replaced the @ with e, so they say and text "todes". Using e has a political tone to it, while using @ did not.
Literally nobody uses the e, I've never seen anyone in real life using it, most people say todos, but some people still use @
As an English speaker learning Spanish in the age of "tod@s", before the "e" came into practice, I felt the political undertone. I always felt it was stupid, as "todos" is already inclusive. Just as "man" once was in English. We are all "men". That is our species.
How many men you sleep with
He's lying, most people is not retard enough
@@DestopLine some people do, but as he said, it has the political implication of being 'inclusive' in the modern sense. I've seen it more often spoken than written though.
This is honestly well done. The editing, documentation, script, your presentation of them, it’s almost on par with popular related RUclipsrs today.
Keep going! You’re doing great.
Yeah but not because of emails was clickbait as emails are just what that evolved into and now adays emails are the reason that is there
Cap
@@roxaskinghearts nah, the thumb is just completing the title, since the whole video could be clickbait by having a title like this and then everything the video says is "because of emails!".
It's a great way to introduce you to the topic, many well-written articles and even academic researches follow this style
@@samueleproiettimicozzi8134 yeah its called click bait liars deserve no respect o yeah i get it everyone els is so easy to fool with nonsense like this and would overlook it or say nothing about it
see for someone to claim politician they have to understand nuance of our society today and how it is ran not children who sit there and defend their own idiosyncrasies and i get it
im just calling it as i see it
@@roxaskinghearts how is it clickbait if the reason the @ sign is on your keyboard really isn't emails?
In the Netherlands(dutch), the symbol "@" is referred to as the "apenstaartje," which translates to "monkey's tail." The name "apenstaartje" is derived from the word "aap" meaning monkey, and "staart" meaning tail. Therefore, when combined, it represents the tail of a monkey.
In Poland it is literally called monkey, and there is no alternate reference AFAIK.
The ampersand & makes a great duck in 8-bit shooting gallery games too.
@@tobe2240małpa I know it all too-well.
its actually called ampersand in English, but is colloquially referred to as "at"
@@carlhilber2275 Isn't that &?
As someone who collects typewriters (owning some from 1912 to the 1970s,
Including 2 underwood typewriters identical to the one shown in this video), I've often wondered why there's an @ symbol. Thanks for clearing it up.
I still don't understand why there is an @ on typewriters. What did they use it for in the 20 th century?
@@louistournas120 like it said in the video. commercial use.
c@
@@louistournas120 typed invoice, for example, Widgets 2 @ $1.00, etc
woah hey guy calm down, save some women for the rest of us
I was wondering why this was on my 1959 (?) vintage typewriter, this clears it up. Playing with an old typewriter has offered a lot of insight into the design and function of modern keyboards, answered a lot of questions I'd never thought to ask about why they are the way they are. "Caps Lock" evolved from "Shift Lock," which mechanically locked the shift button down, the shift key physically shifting the entire assembly down to use different characters on the type bar (the name doesn't make much sense in modern context but makes sense given this). The "QWERTY" layout isn't to make people type slower as often said, but to have it so that most of the time letters from left and right alternate to prevent the type bars colliding - the one oversight is the proximity of "T" and "H," those are too close together and jam on a regular basis.
In addition, on early computers the caps lock key also locked in the pressed position when it was active, mimicking typewriters
@@InkboxSoftware Interesting - I wonder how similar early computer keyboards looked to typewriters? Though of course later typewriters, especially electronic ones, looked a lot more like computer keyboards than the earlier typewriters that we all visualize.
One interesting comparison between the modern "Caps Lock" and typewriter/early computer "Shift Lock" is that Caps Lock only applies to letters, has no effect on other characters: ABC123, while shift lock would give the secondary character for all keys: ABC!@#
While writing that, I thought of yet another interesting thing - on modern keyboard the 1 key doubles as "!". My 1959(?) vintage Smith Corona mechanical typewriter has neither of those characters, presumably using "l" for "1" and ' [backspace] . for "!" This perhaps explains why modern keyboards, needing to add both, have "1" and "!" as the same key, the others unchanged.
Don’t forget the “CDE” cluster...
@@quillmaurer6563Exclamation point was, to my knowledge, printed as apostrophe + period. On typewriters as well as in ASCII, the apostrophe was straight instead of curly (like the ones that MS Word replace your boring ASCII quotes with).
@@cmyk8964 Yes, that's correct for the exclamation point. To be more exact with how that works technically is you type the apostrophe, then hit the backspace, and then finally type the period. The reason for the backspace is because each time you type a key on the typewriter, the carriage advances one space forward. On a vintage mechanical typewriter, the backspace was not a "delete the previous character" as it is today in digital keyboards, but instead, moved your current position back one space. Source: I own a vintage Royal typewriter from 1959
I think another interesting use from the @ sign is in aviation. In the days that ATC was done using purely pen and paper the @ symbol was the go to symbol for "at and maintain". It's still used to this day. Not an origin story by any means but an interesting side note.
this video made me remember that @ in swedish is actually pronounced "snabel-a" which literally means trunk-a (as in the trunks elephants have) but I haven't heard basically anyone call @ that in years. I guess "at" is 2 fewer syllables than "snabel-a" so its a lot easier to just call it the English "at" especially when @ comes up everywhere nowdays.
idk thats fascinating to me, not only has the choice to use @ in email addresses affected the internet but also how people use language
As a programmer, I use the @ symbol to create commands for bug testing. Mostly because it's so easy to find when combing through thousands of lines of code.
As a perl programmer, this doesn't work for me
If you're in Java, it's heavily used to format Javadoc documents, and iirc is also used to help the compiler for JUnit tests.
also python decorators
Meanwhile, I'm a sane person that uses the more recognized but least used letter Q for any test routines while debugging.
@@southernflatland Q looks too much like O. It could easily be passed over when viewing lines of code, especially if you're tired.
I have heard many people call it "at the rate" and I never questioned it until now. Makes a lot more sense in the commercial world, especially the example of France you gave.
side note: @ (the at symbol) is still called "arroba" in the spanish language
Well done.
As a boomer who didn't get his first computer until age 39, I still remain gobsmacked at the fingertip availability of the sum of humanity's knowledge down to the most granular level.
In your pocket.
As a 74 year old, I wonder about people who still won't consult it.
Funny to note that the @ sign in French is called "Arobase" (pronounced ah-rho-baz) which sounds like it comes from that unit of measurement you mentioned in the video.
In Spanish is "arroba"; it never lost its original pronunciation and meaning. now it can mean "at" and "arroba" depending on the context
As others said, as a Spanish speaker I can confirm, @ is still called arroba
In Québec we say "A commercial" (commercial A)
Funny how language changes by just being an ocean away
In Norwegian its called "Alfakrøll" the direct translation to English would be "alphacurl" or "alpha curl". Alpha is the unit of one, we also used it in the comercial space.
In portuguese @ is arroba, just like the video. And the arroba unit is used to this day and is equal to 15kg
The reveal of IBM got me shocked, it's always a great thing to discover the beginning of very important names like the big companies that changed the world back then. You've got a new sub man, love your content
Say potato.
@@glasstuna potato, why?
Huh, so that's why we call it an arroba in Spanish to this day...
I think so?
in Brazil too
In Portuguese too
In French too where it called ‘arobas’.
Another big reason the @ symbol stuck around is because it was used in some assembly instruction sets to modify the addressing mode for registers, essentially telling the computer, “the value here isnt just a value, its a location in memory”. This is also probably part of the reasoning for making the @ symbol standard for email addressing.
@@gabemorales7814 Ah yeah I guess I'm mostly relying on my experience in MIPS for this info
Pointers!
@@seeranos Doesn't have to be MIPS. We did the same thing in Burroughs from the 1960s. Someone above mentioned the DEC-10 did the same thing.
Just one small correction: Just because a character is in ASCII doesn't mean it will have a key on all keyboard layouts. There are plenty of computers with more limited keyboards and (for PCs) keyboard layouts that e.g. don't include ^, ~ or `. So @ could have easily been dropped if there was no common use and available key for it. There are only 47 character-producing keys on a PC keyboard afterall. Those plus space are 95 different characters, exactly the same number as ASCII has printable characters. Including any additional character (e.g. § ¶ ◄ µ € ² ³) would kick one of those off.
yeah it could easily have been replaced if nobody wanted it, but did want something else.
Every computer from about the 1970s/80s onwards supports ASCII, except old IBM mainframes and other mainframes that wanted to be compatible with them. Certainly ASCII support has always been universal among microprocessor-based computers, as well as “minicomputers” from the like of DEC, DG and others. And of course if a computer was going to run a Unix OS, then ASCII support was a requirement.
Yep. The ever popular Teletype model 33, commonly used with computers, was upper case only.
I'm really curious to see what these keyboards are that redefine what's above 6, because anything doing this would be out of spec with USB HID, in addition to breaking keyboard layout standards on the PC that have existed long before USB.
What's on the keyboard are the printable 7-bit ASCII characters which are the original definition, the 8 bit characters didn't come until much later. International keyboards do that and more (like the euro symbol) with AltGr.
You can add another one by making shift+space distinct from space
The thing I've never understood is why US PC keyboards moved the @ sign to 2, replacing " which was previously on that key on typewriters and early computers. Even its position in ASCII is due to its position on the keyboard when the shift key just used to XOR the key value with 0x20. A lot of Asian countries followed the position on US keyboards, but most of Europe including the UK stuck with the traditional positions. They question is why did anyone move it at all? The earliest "old" computers (that I can find pictures of) with @ on 2 seem to be DEC (VT52 and VT100 onwards) and obviously the IBM PC. But many other common terminals such as the adm-3a had " on 2. Did IBM copy DEC and if so why did DEC move it? The VT52 (1974) has @ on 2, but the older VT05 (1970) has " on 2.
That bugs the shit out of me, every few years I'll come across an OS where the input is set to US English and typing any command featuring an @ gets screwed up, leading me to scratch my head for a moment or two until I remember to use SHIFT-2 for it.
@h yes, the @ symbol
I think you meant:
@h yes, the a symbol
@@nas73603 I think you me@nt :
@h, the @ symbol
Oh yes, the o symbol
b@ 🦇
F@
So as others mention how this symbol is called in their languages, in Russian it's called "sobaka", literally translating as "dog". Somehow unlike finnish people, it appeared to look like a curled up dog instead of a cat here and a bit resembling bark being called "at" in English XD
Meanwhile in my language it's called "monkey"
Slavic languages do have some oddities
Considering that, if this video is correct, the @ sign appeared in Cyrillic long time ago, I wonder how it got into Slavic languages with all weird names. But it's not only about Slavic as it seems, many many languages have weird names.
In Belarusian and Ukrainian it's a Snail, as well as in... Italian. In Ukrainian it's also a puppy. Bulgarian and Polish think it's a monkey. Turkic languages went crazy too: Kazakh -- Moon's ear, Turkish - meat (?), Uzbek - puppy again! Tatar - dog, but I guess it's Russian influence.
Almost like the symbol came from nowhere and everyone invented their own names.
I guess that's because it's not a letter really, not a word, but just it, a symbol.
and despite at-sign being non-existant in Soviet Union before appearance of desktops, nobody really knows why is it called dog. I like to say 'commercial at' is borrowed from Tatar et/эт - dog, cause why not
Your picture of the PDP-10 (KA10) computer is all the reason needed for @ to stick around, it is used for indirect addressing in MACRO-10 assembly language. Unfortunately, the back arrow character was removed in 1967 but we adapted by switching to the less descriptive "=", and replacing back arrow with "_" in ASCII was an improvement, and at that time lower case was not commonly available so there were few other candidates for removal.
Early ASCII had “↑” which was replaced with “^”, and “←” which was replaced with “_”.
DEC’s assemblers for both PDP-10 and PDP-11 families used “@” for indirect addressing modes. The 18-bit and 12-bit machines, being simpler, just put an “I” modifier in the instruction.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 And for some reason, Commodore stuck with those left-facing and upward-facing arrows for characters 95 and 94, respectively, on their 8-bit computers. And early versions of Microsoft BASIC (not the Commodore version) used character 95 (left-arrow, which became underscore) for character delete, and "@" for line delete.
In addition to its meaning of "per" it also sometimes stood for "approximately". Those of us over 50 can still remember these uses.
I'm over 50, and the tilde ~ has always been used to mean approximately for me.
The use of ~ as "approximate" comes from the proper mathematical symbol, which is a squiggly equal sign and is not on a keyboard.
I've always liked the at symbol, and it never made sense that in C and languages based on it that they went with ampersand to indicate address of. I guess if e-mail had become popular before C was designed that it would be the other way around, but for my own language I decided to break from the convention that C uses and instead use the at symbol for my address of operator. I think this video vindicates my choice.
woah you're right, that's the perfect use for it, i never would've thought about that
@ would be the perfect choice for dereferencing operator more then the address of operator in my opinion. If we had a pointer p, we could look what at the address p points to with @p instead of *p. This would also maybe clear some confusion with using * to declare pointers and also to dereference them which are unrelated.
@@Kycilak I don't disagree that it is confusing to use the same symbol to declare a pointer and dereference it, but I'd actually rather not use @ for dereferencing, and instead look to a new symbol, such as $. Consider that what dereferencing really is, is acquiring the value at that address. Obviously using such a symbol would be a bit fraught, but for internationalization of my language it could be possible to use any country's currency symbol.
@@anon_y_mousse - My suspicion is the primary reason for PERL to have been discarded is because they used $ to dereference, probably the ugliest character possible.
@@jrstf Except that it didn't use it to dereference, but rather to denote that it was a variable, period. Using it for literally every manipulation of a variable is certainly tiresome.
My understanding is the @ symbol on typewriters in England came from commercial usage, where in a list of prices you could have ten items priced at 9 pence, 10@9p=90pence.
Two other uses of the "@" symbol::
(1) the TRS-80 Color Computer used "@" after "PRINT" to print a message at a specific location on the screen.
(2) Most early Intellivision video games featured "@" on the title screen, used as a copyright (©) symbol.
@ has also been the default avatar for games with rogue like graphics.
BBC BASIC used the @ in the @% system variable to control the print format.
So is RUclips just people monetizing reading Wikipedia at this point? It'd be nice if you threw in some of your own thoughts...
Great job taking a long history and boiling it down to the key points. Well done!
I am amazed you kept me interested for 7:07 minutes in a video about the @ sign. Well done. Excellent information too.
You should cover the history of the * and # keys, including their use on phones.
The # symbol is originally known as the octothorpe symbol. In more modern times, it's become known as the hash mark, number sign, and pound sign.
I personally refuse to call it a 'hashtag', as it's blasphemy upon the origins of the symbol.
It's an octothorpe, look it up.
@@southernflatland I call it a hash. It's easier than fucking octothorpe and it sure as fuck isn't a hashtag.
@@southernflatland I am aware of its origins as being interchangeable with ℔ which is how it earned the name "pound sign" in the first place and how it used to be known as the "number sign" for its use with competition placement designations and numerical designations but most people aren't aware. Not to mention its use in voicemail systems. Also it has historically been known as a "hash" and "hash sign" as well. Also "sharp" because it resembles ♯ , hex in Singapore and Malaysia and square. which is actually ⌗ and not # . There's a whole bunch of other slang terms for it too.
@@southernflatlandot called hash
It's called sharp
I call it hash tho
No one wants to say a mouthful of a word every time they refer to this symbol
No ones really gonna understand what an octothorpe is anyway
@@RenderingUser I'm fine with calling it the 'pound' symbol, that's what I originally learned it as anyways. It's one syllable anyways.
Like who the hell decided to change and complicate that into the two syllable form 'hashtag' anyways?
Changing words to more complicated words (more syllables) for no good reason makes absolutely no sense.
At 6:49, there is a spoken and visual error: "@ was in ASCII and BCDIC" and both those acronymical words are displayed. However, as the presenter said earlier, @ was not included in BCDIC; it was added during the creation of Extended BCDIC (acronym for which was and still is EBCDIC and spoken within the trade as "EbbSeDick").
This should be a pinned comment.
Usually I kinda just space out while watching videos on topics like this but this is so well made that it captured my attention entirely
In Swedish, the @ symbol is called "snabel-a", which means "[elephant's] trunk a".
I previously wondered about the origin of the symbol and was satisfied to discover that before computers it was used in commercial notation, which explained to me why it arrived on computer keyboards. I didn't know about the unit of measure, but I do know that in Spanish (at least Salvadoran Spanish), the symbol is still called "arroba".
I'm not sure I fully agree with the conclusion that it would still be on standard keyboards without email just because it was included in ASCII. As computers became more general use, it could have easily been replaced with something more relevant to general users, like if somebody developing keyboard layouts decided that the common user was more interested in taking about temperatures than about commodity trades and it caught on, we could have had a world where ° replaced @ before someone invented the user@server scheme. What was on keyboards dictated what went into ASCII, ASCII doesn't dictate what's on keyboards.
° is also part of ASCII, and most keyboard layouts include it.
In old typewriters it was used for composite characters like å.
@@davidwuhrer6704 Most keyboard layouts outside the US anyway. Here in the US it's pretty much unheard of to see ° on a keyboard.
There was one on my old VIC 20 keyboard too, but there was also an English pound sign. Both had little use for me back then, They carried over to the Commodore 64, which uses an identical keyboard. Also the Commodore 128 had them too, and that's when I actually started using @ because I first started to use the internet with the Commodore 128D accessing a shell account at the University through a 1200 Bps modem.
The Commodores used their own encoding system called PETSCII. It had the @ symbol because PETSCII borrowed heavily from the first version of ASCII, which had no lower-case characters but did have an @ symbol.
The idea that some people think @ was invented for email doesn't surprise me as there are younger people today who think # is called hashtag and was invented for social media..!
Interesting that you mention @ being used to mean versus. It kind of does in US sports like basketball where you'll see matches advertised on TV as Team A @ Team B, I'm sure they actually mean "at" literally, but it's kind of funny how things come back around.
I mean hell, versus is latin for 'towards'
On UK keyboard layout the @ symbol is still in the original place it was on ancient type writers, near the shift key. USA must have decided they wanted to be different again for some reason.
@ in other languages (like Dutch and Romania) is called “arond”. I was shocked to learn that English-folks were calling @ “at”.
Always used it notes handwritten shorthand meaning around - as in " I'll be home @ 9:00" is that a connection to arrond?
I was taught it was the "each" symbol, as the "a" is inside an outer "e". It was used the same as "at", but would say - 10 units "each" $23 = I'm happy to be re-informed and corrected from your video!
I don't think you're wrong. In English, the @ was used on store signage to mean 'each at'. It's an 'a' inside a stylized 'e'. This to differentiate from a group price. Say you had a stack of four tires on display, with a sign saying $6. This could be understand that the tires were four for $6. But if the sign says @$6, then four tires was $24.
Whether there was an obscure latinate usage meaning 100 pounds, it was functionally used to mean 'each at' in American commercial environments, the primary place where computers were first created. I've had this argument with people for years, that even pronouncing it as the 'at' symbol is not correct. but you know . . . .lost that argument. :-)
In my country the @ symbol meant 'alias' before email became popular in the 90s, by then it became 'at' as it is known today.
1:30 fun fact: in Spanish, @ is still called "arroba".
I wonder about # or maybe even *, which also seems odd to me as a character.
Actually, what about the many different brackets (, { and [?
In Cyrillic layout, it's " brackets above 2, not @. Of course the key was not going anywhere as it's uppercase number instead of separate button like Windows key that doesn't exist on older keyboards. So yeah it wasn't going anywhere at most the default layout would have changed to a more used diactric mark or something.