It is the best known symbol of the Internet , to such an extent that it has become a representative synonym of the network of networks. But what does it entail and how did it get here?
Documented at least since the 16th century in Portugal, Castile and the Catalan-Aragonese Crown, there are theories that point to a much earlier antiquity, although that is lost in the fog of history.
That first documented use is related to a unit of measurement of capacity, which is how it got into the 20th century. Because of that use, it was considered his inclusion on keyboards machines to write , direct predecessors of computer keyboards.
Curiously, the genesis of the current pronunciation of the word (which has passed from Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan to English) comes from Arabic, and its expansion throughout the world has been mainly due to the trade that Arab merchants established with Europe. and, from the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, to the rest of the world.
But its use in computer science has gone in very different directions:
Ray Tomlinson, inventor of e-mail, decided to use this versatile symbol as a separator between the username and the server name in the addresses so that a user address complies, since the early 70s, with the user @ domain structure. com.
And why did Tomlinson use the at sign instead of another symbol to separate the parts of an email address ? Very simple: because it was the only symbol present on the keyboard that was free and without a defined use. So it was basically a matter of timing.
More recently, the symbol of the Arroba has also served for other uses in other services, such as to indicate users on Twitter
In this way, the Arroba has become popular in front of the username , in the form @user. When seeing this, anyone who knows Twitter knows that they must enter the address www.twitter.com/usuario if they want to access the profile of the person consulted.
But, beyond Twitter, the so-called " mentions " have also gained popularity in other social networks, such as Facebook or Google+, and even in instant messaging systems such as WhatsApp, in which they serve the same purpose: to mention users.
The usefulness of mentions goes beyond calling someone by name; They also trigger the notification mechanism, especially useful on mobile devices such as smartphones , since they allow us to know, in real time, who is asking us on social networks.