It’s the quintessential symbol of the internet and we owe it all to the keystroke of genius of computer programmer Raymond Tomlinson by Glenn Kenny Tuesday 8 March 2016 I can remember the days when I humorously used the “@” symbol on my typewriter or computer keyboard to avoid using actual swear words. This admission outs me as, well, old – and thus separates me from the millions of people for whom “@” has always and ever been the symbol for “at” in an email address.
Raymond Tomlinson, the computer programmer who put that symbol into the email address, before the email address was even called the email address, as it happens, died at the too-early age of 74 last Saturday. He may well have been an intimidatingly brilliant man in every other respect of his life, but at his passing, he is being celebrated for doing precisely one thing. That is: for executing a keystroke of genius. Tomlinson did not invent email. But by creating a system in which a user name was separated from a network destination by the “at” sign he invented email that would not intimidate an ordinary person. A slightly earlier email scheme would send messages to numbered mailboxes, and you can understand why this would not sit well with the general population. In America and the rest of the world, being identified by a number is emblematic of losing one’s identity. It’s like that old Johnny Rivers lyric: “They’ve given you a number/ and taken away your name.” Sure, American citizens like their social security numbers, but they’re taught not to share them with just anybody. By keeping them closely guarded they get a payout in their golden years, or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. In any event, I think we can all agree that email-by-identity-number sounds like something you’d encounter in a dystopian Orwellian nightmare scenario of the 1950s. Email by name, even goofy fake name, maybe especially goofy fake name, is friendly, personal, unpretentious. But that wasn’t what motivated Tomlinson to use the symbol. According to his obituary in the New York Times, what initially attracted Tomlinson to “@” was its sheer availability. The symbol was not present in the user names for the internet precursor he was working with in the early 70s,Arpanet. Despite the tendency of coders to use oodles and oodles of typographical symbols whose significance cannot be grasped by mere non-programming mortals, the symbol at the time had no meaning in the programming Tomlinson was doing. So, as Mount Everest once was “there” for George Mallory, so the “at” symbol was there for Tomlinson. I call it a keystroke of genius because I do remember first using email in the early 1990s. A lot of the times when you’re dealing with new technology, it’s kind of a pain in the cognitive muscles to remember how to do it because it just doesn’t make sense. A particularly petty-seeming example of this is putting a “1” in front of a US telephone area code when making a call. Older phone users, again, like me, reflexively bristle: “When did the area code itself stop being enough?” When I first started on AOL, and then when I went to work as a consultant for CompuServe in the mid 90s, working on a project that was going to blow AOL out of the water (you can guess how that turned out), the email address system of a user name followed by an “at” symbol followed by a destination name seemed so easy and intuitive as to feel natural. And this turned out to be the case even in countries where the “@” had been nothing. Tomlinson’s available symbol also made perfect sense as regular person syntax, something that doesn’t happen all that often. For making an action undertaken on a computer seem as intuitive (almost) as drawing breath, Raymond Tomlinson deserves all the salutes.
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