MoM@

design news

Atsignsx015849 Taken from the Daily Heller

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator @ Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA announces that the museum has just acquired the @ symbol for the collection.

In January 1971 electrical engineer Ray Tomlinson, who helped create the first email system, determined that @ was an underused jargon symbol lingering on the keyboard and marred by a very limited register. "By October, Tomlinson appropriated it, imbuing it with new meaning and elevating it to defining symbol of the computer age," notes Antonelli @ the MoMA blog. "He chose the @ for his first email because of its strong locative sense; an individual, identified by a username, is @ this institution/computer/server, and also because...it was already there, on the keyboard, and nobody ever used it,"...read more.