Where It's @

New York City's Museum of Modern Art is where it's @.

MoMA announced they "acquired" the famous "@" symbol for their collection.

According to Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the Department of Architecture and Design, the "@" mark excels in form and function - though its not exactly a modern design, it's one of the most ubiquitous symbols of the Internet era.

The man who put "@" on the map was Ray Tomlinson, an engineer for the company hired to build the ARPANET for the US Defense Department. He wrote the first program to move messages from one computer to another, actually two computers that were sitting besides each other, but connected by the ARPANET. In 1971, a simple test message: "QWERTYUIOP" became the first spam... Because as Tomlinson is quoted as saying, he invented email, "mostly because it seemed like a neat idea." In 1971 nobody was asking for it.



Beck - Where It's At (1996) courtesy Geffen Records.