But the @ sign got a revival as the critical connector in e-mail addresses, and now it has been elevated to a with-it symbol, an instant emblem of the digital age.

As a catchy, high-tech slogan for their city, some Atlantans have proposed @lanta. As part of an exhibit on icons, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art raved, ``The @ is a condenser of the word 'at' that wraps its very terseness around itself.'' Billionaire Bill Gates tossed it into the title of his best-selling book ``Business @ the Speed of Thought.'' Colorful names are circling the globe. In South Africa, the @ sign is referred to as a monkey's tail. In Italy, some call it a snail. In China, little mouse Elsewhere, it has been named everything from an elephant's trunk to astrudel. In the U.S., where its clunky title is the ``commercial at'' sign, the curly character for a long time meant just that: at. As in, two apples @25 cents=50 cents. But why on earth did ``at,'' a two-letter word, need to be abbreviated in the first place? And why did the coiled critter remain a fixture on the typewriter keyboard for decades after most people ever used it?

Answers to these and other imponderables require unraveling the fluky and resilient history of the @ sign, an epic that spans centuries, from parchment to the Internet. The curly symbol originated as a shortcut for medieval calligraphers, and, by hook or crook, it ended up pretty much outlasting Latin, Old and Middle English, and it kept rolling right on through the printing press, the Teletype and the typewriter. It might never have made it to the Age of the Internet but for a masterstroke one winter day in 1971, in Cambridge, Mass. There, in the offices of computer company Bolt Beranek & Newman, a 30-year-old programmer named RayTomlinson surveyed the keyboard on his Model-33 Teletype. A pioneer in the programming of e-mail, he was hunting for a single character to separate a name from a place so that computers routing messages wouldn't confuse the two.

Tomlinson is widely credited with being the first to press the ``shift'' and ``2'' keys together to launch the @ sign into cyberspace. He began by sending test messages back and forth in his office from one Digital PDP-10, a refrigerator-size computer, to another. His first-of-its-kind address: tomlinson@bbn-tenexa.

``When you look at a keyboard, there aren't a whole lot of choices,'' says the 58-year-old Tomlinson, playing down his symbolic achievement. ``It pretty much jumped right out at me.''

Centuries earlier and an ocean away, the symbol got its start as a ligature, meaning two letters bound together, according to Berthold L. Ullman, a professor of Latin at the University of Chicago, in his 1932 book ``Ancient Writing and Its Influence.'' Parchment was scarce andprecious, and European scribes devised numerous ligatures to save time and space. Toiling over texts, they often had to smash letters together -- a and e, f and l, t and h particularly when they reached the end of lines.

The @ sign abbreviated the Latin ad, a versatile little term meaning to, toward, near or at. A scribe would write the ``a'' and then merely curl the upstroke of the ``d'' around it, counterclockwise. The @ sign probably surfaced in the Middle Ages, perhaps as an eighth-century contemporary of a new symbol, the question mark. That would make the @ character quite ancient much older than symbols like the British pound sign or the apostrophe, which made their marks in the 16th century.

In the past few centuries, the @ symbol mostly came to mean ``price per unit,'' or the cost of inividual goods on orders and bills. Just before the turn of this century, boxy machines called Type-writers, which sold for hefty prices of $100 or more, had been having a hard time cracking the workplace. But in1884, the @ symbol was affixed to the Caligraph No. 3 Commercial model. It spread to other models, and shortly thereafter, the typewriter took off.

Over the years, the little curlicue roamed the keyboard. On the Blickensderfer Electric model of 1902, the @ sign sat on the same key as the V. It hopped over to the Z key on the No. 12 Hammond in 1905. In Underwood models in the early 1920s, the cents sign and the @ sign shared a key -- which was supposed to be struck with the right pinkie.

Early this century, typists were taught by rote to use the @ sign. But by the time the U.S. mobilized for World War II, army clerks and secretarial pools had already begun shunning the little symbol. Orphaned, the @ sign nonetheless endured on keyboards. Maybe that is because it is too intricate a character impossible to improvise. In redesigns, typewriter manufacturers sometimes yanked other symbols from keyboards because typists learned to ``construct'' missing characters. Why, in some cases, was the cents sign pulled?A small c overtyped by a diagonal forward slash, otherwise known as a virgule, made a nifty replacement. Whatever the case, the @ sign clung to the keys long enough for Tomlinson, the computer pioneer, to punch it into the digital age. Nearly three decades later, it's putting stamps to shame. Billions of e-mail messages pop up on computer screens each year and every single one is delivered by the @.

-- The Wall Street Journal