Concept in Definition ABC

It is the best known symbol of Internet, to such an extent that it has become a representative synonym of the network of networks. But what does it imply 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 the story

That first documented use is related to a unit of measurement of capacity, which is how it came to the 20th century. Because of that use, it was considered his inclusion on keyboards of machines to write, direct predecessors of computer keyboards.

Interestingly, the genesis of the current pronunciation of the word (which has passed from Portuguese, the Spanish and Catalan, into English) comes from Arabic, and its expansion throughout the world has been due to mainly to Commerce that Arab merchants established with Europe and, beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, the rest of the world.

But its use in the science of computing has gone by very different paths:

Ray Tomlinson, inventor of email, decided to use this versatile symbol as a separator between username and email. server 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 address from email? Very simple: because it was the only symbol present in 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 name of Username, of the form @usuario. When seeing this, anyone who knows Twitter knows that they must enter the address www.twitter.com/user if they want to access the profile of the person consulted.

But, beyond Twitter, the calls “mentions”Have also gained popularity in other social networks, such as Facebook or Google+, and even in systems instant messaging such as WhatsApp, in which they serve the same purpose: mentioning 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 questions us on social networks.

Photos: Fotolia - singkham / alexmillos