The at symbol in email was chosen almost by accident

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson picked the little-used at sign to separate a user from their host machine. That choice shaped how billions of addresses look today. In 1971, engineer Ray Tomlinson needed a character to separate a person's name from the computer they used, for the first system that could send messages between different machines. He picked the @ symbol mainly because it was on the keyboard and rarely used elsewhere. The @ sign had existed on typewriters and keyboards for decades before that, mostly for commercial pricing notation like "3 widgets @ $5", but had no real use in computing text. Tomlinson chose it specifically because it could not appear in a person's name and would not be confused with other characters, and the message format he devised, name@host, became the template every email address has followed since. He reportedly considered the choice unremarkable at the time and didn't expect it to matter much.

The at symbol in email was chosen almost by accident

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