The History of the Weird Keyboard Symbols You Never Knew You Needed

Before the age of the internet, you likely never noticed some of the keyboard symbols that you now use all the time. Most of us still don't know the actual history behind these now-ubiquitous symbols, the reasons they exist, or how they ended up in your email addresses and URLs. It's actually fascinating once you start digging. It turns out that type itself dates back to the early days of civilization. So even in cyberspace, there are a few paleolithic surprises.

Take the @ sign, for example. Tts originated amongst bookkeepers who used "at" to indicate how many items they were buying or selling, to its current ubiquity a symbol for "you" and your online identity.

And it's not just the @ symbol that has a sordid past. Many of the symbols that you're jamming into your keyboard on a daily basis had rich past lives before they became internet-age fixtures.

Source: The History of the Weird Keyboard Symbols You Never Knew You Needed

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