That corroborates what I've read. The DEC PDP-11 assembler used the @ symbol for dereferences of registers ("@Rn" or "(Rn)" dereferenced a register, for exampl

That corroborates what I've read. The DEC PDP-11 assembler used the @ symbol for dereferences of registers ("@Rn" or "(Rn)" dereferenced a register, for example). However, in Unix, the terminal convention was to use the @ symbol to delete the current line, and they didn't have a DEC assembler yet, so they used the asterisk (*) instead in B, as well as in the Unix PDP-11 assembler, which was written in B. I'm paraphrasing this Quora post (which lists primary and secondary sources): https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-developers-of-C-decide-to-use-an-asterisk-instead-of-the-much-more-intuitive-for-pointers https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-developers-of-C-decide-to-...