WHY was the "@" sign invented? The "@" sign, so common in email addresses nowadays, wasn't invented especially for the Internet, as it may seem.
The "@" sign has been around since the Renaissance, in the 15th and 16th centuries. In Spanish, Portuguese and French the symbol traditionally meant an arroba,
a weight measure of 12-13 kilograms. The @ symbol then became a variant of the preposition "at" in cursive letters, as it helped to condense notes.
Since it was used in accounting documents, it naturally appeared on the keyboards of the first typewriters. That's where Ray Tomlinson, a researcher at the American company BBN Technology, saw it when he was developing an email program that allowed messages to be sent to a remote computer. That's how the sign became a symbol of e-mail.
