New York's Moma claims the @ symbol as a design classic

The following article has been taken from The Guardian's website. The article discuses the origins of the asperand and how it has become the defining image of the digital age.

New York's Moma claims @ as a design classic

Nearly 40 years after email was invented, the Museum of Modern Art celebrates the significance of the asperand

When the curious letters and digits of my first email address were handed to me at university in 1995, it looked like someone had leaned on a keyboard. I had no idea how important email would soon become. And nestled in every email and, later, in every Twitter post, would be the humble asperand, quietly directing millions of communications for us every day.

The day has come for the hard-working @ symbol. This week, New York's Museum of Modern Art claimed the asperand for its architecture and design collection. According to senior curator Paola Antonelli,museums no longer need to take physical possession of an object to acquire it.

"This sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that 'cannot be had' – because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747s, satellites) or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @," she said.

There are competing claims for the origins of the asperand. It may have begun in the sixth or seventh century with a symbol for the word "towards", while other historians variously describe its use in 16th century Florence, Seville and in France as a unit of measurement . From those roots in accountancy, it eventually made it to a commercial typewriter keyboard in 1885 as pricing shorthand. And then Ray Tomlinson found it.

Tomlinson is something of a legend within computing circles because of his role in the invention of email. Developed in 1965, the first electronic messaging would only allow messages to be exchanged between users on the same computer. Software developed by Tomlinson in 1971 allowed messages to be sent between different computers, and when he wrote the programme he needed to find a little-used punctuation symbol to separate the name and address components of the email. In a defining moment for a defining symbol of the computer age, Tomlinson chose the asperand.

Nearly 40 years on and Tomlinson's errand boy has been elevated to the status of design classic. "Tomlinson performed a powerful act of design that not only changed the @ sign's significance," says Antonelli, "but enabled it to become an important part of our identity in relationship and communication with others."

Jemima Kiss The Observer, Sunday 28 March 2010