About hobgoblins and @ signs

Philip A. Shea of Alexandria, Va., was dismayed by what he perceived as a flagrant disregard of consistency in IEEE Spectrum. Shea's indictment was leveled at the January 2001 issue. On page 68 he found three ways of writing measurements and values. "500 Gb/s, 10-Gb/s, and 128MB are in the first full paragraph on the page," noted Shea. "Scanning through the magazine, I saw that a dash, a space, and no space were used seemingly randomly. I don't want to nitpick such a fine publication, but what does your style guide say?" Acording to Spectrum's style chief all three ways of writing the measurements are valid. In the first two cases, the way the value is written (hyphen or space) depends on which part of speech the value assumes. When it comes to binary-multiples of numbers, both space and hyphen go out the window, regardless of the entity's grammatical status. The goal is to differentiate 1000 from 1024, where k and K, respectively, are used without spaces. Regarding current e-mail address structure, the use of the @ in e-mail addresses was the brainchild of Ray Tomlinson in 1972. As documented by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon in Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the Origins of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998), Tomlinson wrote much of the basic e-mail software for Arpanet, the predecessor of today's Internet. He needed a character to separate the user's name from the rest of the address, but it had to be something that wasn't part of a person's name. Deciding to settle on one of the punctuation marks, he said, "I got there first so I got to choose any punctuation I wanted."