Yup – “@” was used to mean “at”, but only in certain circumstances. Nobody ever used it in the middle of sentences in place of the word – “Meet me @ the statue in five minutes”, or in gambling ("@ 5:1 odds"), or (except for Bester, in one novel) in place of the syllable “at” in names. They only used it in a few specific instances.
Heck, no point in pointing that out.
Because American typewriters had # but not £ ?
This usage of “pound” sometimes shows up in Canada too, mostly in phone-system instructions, becuae it’s a convenient one-syllable expression, similar to “star” for *. (“Press pound after entering the number.”) I don’t remember hearing it at all before I encountered such phone systems.
I’m sure The Master had something to say about this…
I beleive # is historically referred to as an octothorpe.
I’ve never seen # used to denote the British pound, but it is often called the pound sign, here in the US. I’ve seen it used it to indicate the unit of weight, the pound.
i.e. 10# of potatos
I vaguely remember the @ called “around”.
“a” with a circle drawn around it.
:dubious:
No idea of the spelling because of course you only hear them @ is ‘chiocciola’ (snail) in Italian and ‘arobaz’ inb French - I’ve never heard arobaz in any other contaxt but with a bit of luck Clairobscur will be along to help out.
In English this Brit says @ = at, # = hash.
Where I used to work, if you were away from your desk and got a call the secretary would answer for you, but you could pick it up anywhere by pressing a certain key combination (like #51).
So they would announce over the intercom: “Smith, pound five one”. Everytime I heard that I always thought to myself, “Why can’t Smith just ‘press’ 51”. 
Really? When visiting some distant relatives circa 1979 or 1980, well before widespread e-mail, I remember seeing a note on their family message board that said “Went to Tim’s. Home @ 4,” and puzzling for a long time what exactly @ meant. (My favorite guess was “around”, since it’s a line drawn around an a.)
Two random thoughts on @:
[ol]
[li]Was it ever really a big time-saver, writing “@” instead of “at”? I think it actually takes me longer to write the at-sign than it does a proper “at”, but maybe I should just practice more. Who gave us this ridiculous symbol anyway? Some accountant with no sense of aesthetics is my guess.[/li]
Odd that we have a single symbol meaning “at” (for prices originally), one meaning “and”, one meaning “percent”, and one symbol each for various national currencies. But we have no symbol for “or”, “but”, “the”, “this”, “that”, and so many other small words that are much more common than “at”.
[li]It amuses me that foreign languages end up calling “@” by some other, unrelated name, like “monkey’s tail” or “elephant snout”, which in a way destroys the rationale for having it in Internet addresses. If you’re not reading the symbol as “at”, then the convention makes no sense.[/li]
That’s not to make fun of foreigners. If anything I’m making fun of the engineers (fellow Americans in fact) who chose this convention years ago, oblivious to email’s global future.
[/ol]
I’m at work, so I don’t have the reference book on hand (I’m pretty sure I read it in Where Wizards Stay up Late: the Origin of the Internet), but the separator symbol between the username and the domain was chosen just because it was a little-used ASCII symbol, and was not a valid character for either usernames or domain names. When the email specs were being developed, they needed something as a separator, it could’ve just as easily been a # or =. The “at” convention was a coincidence.
Ok, as I tried to dig up a cite, I came across this, which implies that the “at” meaning of the symbol may have had an influence in the choice of separator character:
http://www.chick.net/wizards/email.html
{about 1/4 of the way down the page, I just did a “Find” on that page for “@”, it’s the second hit}
Commercial at.
I don’t think it was completely coincidental. There was a set of available seperators and @ was a nice fit for the purpose. The writers of the original RFC governing Internet email would likely have been well aware of @'s conventional uses. Your story sounds a bit like the "“Pine is not Elm” internet legend.
We’re working on that. 
No. That’s a neologism coined by a Bell Labs employee in the 60s. It has a far longer history being known as a hash symbol.
[QUOTE=Bytegeist]
[li]It amuses me that foreign languages end up calling “@” by some other, unrelated name, like “monkey’s tail” or “elephant snout”, which in a way destroys the rationale for having it in Internet addresses. If you’re not reading the symbol as “at”, then the convention makes no sense.[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
In India, they get very precise and read “@” as “at the rate of.” “my dot name at the rate of company dot com.” It makes me giggle.
That’s odd. I have many relatives living in India, and I’ve never heard anyone say that when they give me their email addresses. Where did you hear this?
From pretty much all my relatives in Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta – and it was people from all kinds of backgrounds, including, accounting, engineering, and advertising.