5@ 0.50 is definitely 5 bananas (or bannanas) at fifty cents each, because the @ works like a multiplication symbol here. You could write:
5.60
or something like that.
And if the sum would line up underneath the other numbers, everything’d be perfect!
Since this is of crucial importance, I thought I’d add the latest on World Banana Pricing and News
I’m sorry I couldn’t find anything for banannas. I think I made up for it with this memorable headline:
Attack Bananas!!! Be ascared, be verrrrry ascared.
There is indeed at least one poster here from Peoria, AZ. There may be others. :eek:
I wonder if Mr. Tally Mon uses @ to tally the bananas…
<Start imaginary history>
Record Producer:
“Yes Mr. Belafonte, it’s a cute song. But will it play in Peoria?”
<End imaginary history>
If you lived where I do, you could pick your own damn bananas right off the old banana tree. The price would then be:
asmanydamnbananasasyouwant@$0.00
Betcha didn’t know that a banana tree puts out (leave it alone) one load of bananas and then croaks. But another banana tree springs up from the roots of the old one, does its job and then dies while yet another banana tree sprouts, ad infinitum.
So the question, then, should not be where is Peoria, but where is Phoenix?
I grew up down the street from a Mr. Tomlinson. He was the guy who way back when the internet was being born, was the one who decided to use the “@” symbol as a seperator for email addresses. You see him once in a while on “history of the internet” style shows.
So now the killer Bananananas have joined forces with the tomatoes…
time to dig the shelter Wilbur.
Well Springfield as a city exists in: Illinois, Massachusetts (the first incorporated Springfield), Missouri, Oregon, and Ohio.
However, there are towns of Springfield in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Virgin Islands, Vermont, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
Wonder how many states have a “Fairview” in them?
The internet and e-mail have been around a bit longer than that.
dwc1970 is technically correct in that the formal merger of ARPANET, CSNET, et al to form a formal govenering structure for the current Internet did not occur until the early 1980’s, but the use of the term “internet” was in use as a modifier (e.g., “the ARPANET internet”) since 1974.
But the spreadhsheet applications he describes came along still later.
It’s already been noted in this thread that Tomlinson introduced @ into an email address format in 1971. The Arpanet version of his email program (including the use of @) was released in 1972. By 1973, e-mail was estimated to account for 75% of all Arpanet traffic.
The first general-purpose (not limited to accounting) computerized spreadsheet, Visicalc, was first advertised in 1979. Lotus 1-2-3 came along around 1982. Excel (originally written for the Apple Macintosh) came out in 1984.
The TRS-80 came out in August 1977, again, long after @ was established in email addresses.
From that same site, more amusing headlines:
U.S. and Europeans Agree on Deal to End Banana Trade War
Banana Workers Allege Abuses (my god they’ve enslaved the bananas and now they are abusing them!!)
NEXT LESSON: How to protect yourself from an attacker weilding a banana.
“but what if he’s got a bunch?”
“but what if he’s got a pointed stick?”
What if he’s got a bunch of pointed sticks?
One must draw the line somewhere.
At the Deli where I buy breakfast most mornings, they have a basket of bananas on the counter, priced precisely @ fifty cents. I think this price is quite competitive with the individual per banana retail prices at the 7-11 down the block. Also, the clerk behind the counter is well prepared in case an attacker wielding a banana attempts a hold-up.
ChordedZither wrote:
Then why was I still forced to use the old “bang-path” style of e-mail address – which has no @ sign in it and in which you must specify every single machine that the message is supposed to be routed through – as late as the mid-1980s? Huh?!
(around 1983)
And it is no mystery why there was a seperate key. It was that way because Radio Shack bought a bunch of surplus keyboards, and T.V sets to build thier computers out of, and the surplus keyboards had that @ key (IIRC they originally inteneded for some kind of dumb terminal) If you took a TRS-80 model I monitor apart, you could see the holes for the tuner knobs for the black and white television. IT was covered up from the outside by a piece of plastic that was glued over the holes.
The character generator was defective, the lower case a was at the top of the charactor insted of the bottom(kinda floating), so they got a good deal on them and re-designed the hardware to lock out lower case. I used to do a mod to model ones where I bypassed the hardware on the board, soldered in a new gate, and all of a sudden, the TRS-80 had upper and lower case(with a screwed up a)…On the newer model I’s the generator was ok, but it was locked out anyway…
Also, they got a deal on a large quantitiy of gates that were defective. There were supposed to be like 4 gates on a chip, but only three worked in that run(Its been a long time, I dont remember specifics). So they actually re-designed the circuit board so that it could only use the good gates, and they could get the defective chips cheaply. Sometimes the newer model I’s were made after they ran out of the bargain chips, so all the gates on the chip were good, and you could splice into one of the unused ones for the lowercase mod(so you wouldnt have to ad another gate)
You gotta realize that Radio Shack never thougth that these things would sell. One of thier engineers(or so the story goes), just designed it on his own and convinced Tandy to produce them.
Yep, back in those days computer geeks were real computer geeks…We actually did modifications to our hardware that required soldering and everything. You kids today have it too easy.
I think we’re missing something rather important here, don’t you?
The History of the Banana In The United States
Personally? I’ve read this thread with great glee. AND, I’ve taken a pencil, and drawn the @ sign a few times. Then, I wrote the word “at” a few times, in block AND in cursive. Guess what?
My personal guess is that the @ sign is a shorthanded icon representing the letters “a-t” when written in a cursive style. If you write an “a” and a “t” quickly, you can see how the “t” might curl a bit, and all of a sudden, you have the @ symbol.
My two cents. Here, have a banana.
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