August | Sunday | 23, 2015 :: Only 16% people said “@” chosen for its use in e-mail addresses in year 1972, 38% said 1984, whereas 31% 1980 & 15% voted for 1976.
The Question of the Weekly Poll was In what year was the “@” chosen for its use in e-mail addresses?
The Nominees were : 1976, 1972, 1980 &1984
The correct answer is In year 1972, “@” chosen for its use in e-mail addresses
The at-sign, @, normally read aloud as “at”, also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at, and less commonly a wide range of other terms (such as the strudel), is originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning “at a rate of” (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 = £14). It was not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, but was on at least one 1889 model and the very successful Underwood models from the “Underwood No. 5” in 1900 onward. It is now universally included on computer keyboards. The mark is encoded at U+0040 @ commercial at (HTML @).
In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, called at site or at rate meaning at and at the rate of. It has rarely been used in financial documents[clarification needed] or grocers’ price tags, and is not used in standard typography.
Since 23 October 2012, the At-sign is registered as a trade mark by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office – DPMA (registration number 302012038338) for @T.E.L.L. While company promoters have claimed that it may from now on be illegal for other commercial interests to use the At-sign,[citation needed] this only applies to identical or confusingly similar goods and no court, German or otherwise, has yet ruled on this purported illegality.
A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses (transmitted by SMTP), as in jdoe@example.com (the user jdoe located at site the example.com domain). BBN Technologies’ Ray Tomlinson is credited with introducing this usage in 1971. This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form user@host is also seen in other tools and protocols; for example, the Unix shell command ssh jdoe@example.net tries to establish an ssh connection to the computer with the hostname example.net using the username jdoe.
On web pages, organizations often obscure email addresses of their members or employees by omitting the @. This practice, known as address munging, makes the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them.
Another contemporary use of the @ symbol in American English is adding information about a sporting event. Opposing sports teams sometimes have their names separated by a v. (for versus). However, the “v.” may be replaced with “@” when also conveying at which team’s home field the game will be played. In this case, the away team is written first.
On some online forums without threaded discussions, @ is used to denote a reply; for instance: “@Jane” to respond to a comment Jane made earlier. Similarly, in some cases, @ is used for “attention” in email messages originally sent to someone else. For example, if an email was sent from Catherine to Steve, but in the body of the email, Catherine wants to make Keirsten aware of something, Catherine will start the line “@Keirsten” to indicate to Keirsten that the following sentence concerns her. This also helps with mobile email users who cannot see bold or color in email.
In microblogging (such as Twitter and StatusNet-based microblogs), @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. “@otheruser: Message text here”). The blog and client software can automatically interpret these as links to the user in question. When included as part of a person’s or company’s contact details, an @ symbol followed by a name is normally understood to refer to a Twitter ID. A similar use of the @ symbol was also made available to Facebook users on September 15, 2009. In Internet Relay Chat (IRC), it is shown before users’ nicks to denote they have operator status on a channel.
