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> Like for example the usage of @, which AFAIK was only used for e-mail because there was no other free char on the developers keyboard available. '@' meant 'a

• tesseract 6y ago
  But traditionally mainly (only?) in the context of "at [price per unit]", not "at [location]".
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    In American usage, it has had widespread use as shorthand for “at” in many different contexts, not just in terms of price per unit fir quite a while; some of them.may have been catalyzed by thr usage in email, but I think enough are older that email fits into an existing pattern rather than creating a new one.
• slightwinder 6y ago
  Yes, in english language. Other languages have/had different names, if they even knew it at this point. There was of course a reason why the @ was on the english keyboard-layout, but it was a very different reason from the later usage as location/user-reference. Point is, if e-mail would have been invented in a different culture, there would be a good chance that the symbol wasn't even on their keyboard at the time and a different symbol would likely have been used.