Inventor of email passes away
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Koniakki
R.I.P along with our social lives.
*No disrespect meant at the respected diceased.
LimitbreakOr
I will think of him everytime i use the @ symbol.
schmidtbag
Funny - now that I think of it, I had no idea what the @ symbol was for before email. I decided to look it up and to my amazement, it is pretty useless. Yes, there are purposes for it, but they're not even used today.
Which gets me to wonder: Of all the symbols known to mankind, they chose @ for the 2 key!? Why!? There are so many better choices that would be used far more often (and might even make programming easier), such as degrees, umlaut, alpha, beta, gamma, theta, omega, division, plus/minus, not-equal, infinity, and so on. And yet, they chose "at".
Ugh...
Denial
You think that alpha, beta, gamma, theta, omega are used more frequently than the @ sign?
schmidtbag
At the very least, Omega is, for electronics purposes. Alpha, beta, and gamma are frequently used for physics. Theta is very common for math. Keep in mind too I'm thinking before the invention of email.
But now that I think of it, none of those symbols would be good to use since they have capital and lower-case variants.
Denial
I was actually trying to look up when the @ key was standardized onto keyboards and couldn't find it. I would assume it was after email was invented because like you said, it was rarely used before that.
But I mean, throughout 4 years of highschool and 4 years of college studying CE, I think I used the @ symbol far more often than any of the ones you suggested. I also feel like learning the alt number combinations is far easier for someone like me, vs's my mom, who had trouble learning how to do shift 2 lol, yet she is going to send far more emails.
That being said, in my search for @ key standard, there are apparently lots of keyboard layouts that have the @ closer to the enter key, most of them have * on the 2 though for whatever reason.
scatman839
I think you guys are all talking about american layout english keyboards.
UK QWERTY has it two keys to the left of ENTER, just above ?
Above 2 is "
Had a google around of different language layouts of QWERTY and AZERTY though, seems like it's most common for @ to be above 2
schmidtbag
But did you use the @ symbol for non-email purposes? Because that's really what I'm getting at here.
No idea behind the reasoning of the other keyboard layouts.
schmidtbag
Ah I forgot that other languages used " above 2. I was aware other keyboards used different layouts. But yes, I am referring to the American QWERTY layout.
waltc3
Yes, and so-and-so @ such-and-such an address is perfectly logical, too, as he was trying to inculcate the idea of "addresses" in physical space for people to conceptualize what they are doing with email. I think it was an inspired choice.
Darkest
What a shame, he had a massive impact on the modern world.
WaroDaBeast
You could make a custom keyboard layout using MSKLC and add those symbols yourself. As for lowercase and uppercase, just use Ctrl+Alt+ for the lowercase version, while the uppercase version would be Ctrl+Alt+Shift+.
Sounds like a pain, I know. At least, I got the Alt Gr key on my keyboard, which is Ctrl+Alt in one single key. 😀
Maybe layouts including Greek characters used in science already exist... who knows?
xIcarus
Well, '@' or 'at' makes a certain kind of sense. Just by the format.
[email]person@provider.countr[/email]y
So you're sending an email to 'person' who has an account at 'provider.country'.
rflair
Moderator
The @ symbol has been used in IRC since the later 80's for OP status.
Clouseau
In case anyone was interested. Was a cool read about the history of the @ symbol.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-accidental-history-of-the-symbol-18054936/?no-ist
kanej2007
RIP. A very great and well needed invention.
