The symbol "@"

Is familiar to all users of the Internet "@" character has appeared hundreds of years ago in medieval monasteries . It was used to refer to the Latin preposition «ad» ( in modern English - «at»), although some researchers have argued that the " dog " came up with the Italian monks .
Be that as it may, this innovation was soon adopted traders : one of the first to use the symbol outside the walls of the monastery, was a Florentine merchant Francesco Lapi , in one of his letters to spell out the " dog" amphora - a standard in those days, a measure of volume, approximately equal to 26 - ty l .
Gradually, the sign began to acquire other uses, for example, in Portuguese, Spanish and French before the "@ " is usually cut an old Spanish measure of weight under the name «arroba», equal to 11,502 lbs. Like symbol " dog ", the researchers found a Russian books XVI-XVII centuries , among them - Ivan the Terrible of Law , dated 1550 , a year and a XIX- th century mark has already been widely accepted as a commodity unit designations .
In 1963 there was a standard encoding ASCII, including 95 -minute characters which present and "dog," and in 1973 , the year members of the organization «Internet Engineering Taskforce» secured use of the mark in the division name and domain - this idea in 1971 the year advanced programmer Ray Tomlinson . Mass "dog" was in 1996 , when there was service «Hotmail».
By the way, " dog" symbol is called only Russian and Ukrainian, in other languages, this character is known by others, sometimes quite unusual names. Italians say «chiocciola» (« snail" ) , in Greece, he is known as «παπακι» - « duck " in the Czech Republic and Slovakia - «zavináč» (« roll herring "), in Taiwan use the term «小 老鼠» ( pronounced " xiao lao shu ") - " mouse ", common name in Israel «שטרודל» - « strudel " and Kazakhstan sign called " ayқұlaқ " - " ear of the Moon."