In March of this year New York's MoMA acquired a classic for their design collection. Actually, they didn't acquire anything tangible. A neat new museum policy decrees that 'you don't have to take physical possession of an object to acquire it'. This gets the museum round the tricky problem of owning big objects like buildings or aircraft that are considered design classics.

In this case the icon MoMA have acquired is tiny - it's the @ symbol. Officially known as an asperand we know it better as the separator symbol between the name and address components of an email. In 1971 it was chosen by Ray Tomlinson, one of the inventors of email, to perform this task. It went from typewriter keyboard technology to become a defining symbol of the digital age... a design classic indeed.