The Reason Why Your Email Address Has an @ in It [Email]
Email is something many of us have only been using for the past 20 years, but its roots go back much much further than that. The earliest traces of email even date back to the 1960s. And according to Wired, computer engineer Ray Tomlinson was responsible for many of email's earliest innovations, including the use of @ in email addresses. The main reason we use @ in email addresses? It's a symbol for a preposition, and it will never be confused for any part of our actual names. "I looked at the keyboard, and I thought: ‘What can I choose here that won't be confused with a username?'" Tomlinson remembers. "If every person had an ‘@' sign in their name, it wouldn't work too well. But they didn't. They did use commas and slashes and brackets. Of the remaining three or four characters, the ‘@' sign made the most sense. It denoted where the user was … at. Excuse my English." Tomlinson calls the ‘@' symbol "the only preposition on ...