day 1030: Happy Birthday SMS and Merry Christmas

“Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’”

From TechCrunch:

"On December 3rd, 1992 in the little town of Newbury, Berkshire, a UK programmer sent his best mate a few lines of greeting using a unique new technique called Short Messaging Service. The programmer, Neil Papworth, was a test engineer for the Sema Group, and sent the message via PC to the phone of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone employee. The message was “Merry Christmas.” Vodafone intended the service as a fun and easy way to communicate internally. That obviously wasn’t the case. It took seven years after that first message for texting to take off, but now nearly 8 trillion messages cross the air every year. Adults 18-25 send 133 messages a week each.  SMS was, at least in Europe, popular for a number of reasons. Before inexpensive service plans, a single ring to a person’s phone from yours was used as a sort of signal that you had arrived or that you wanted to chat. This gave way to texts, which were often cheaper than “phone impulses,” relegating voice calls to the back burner. SMS began with pagers which, in turn, got their start in telegraphy and telex. Messages like 911 and 07734 (read it upside down) were ways to send quick notes to friends. This led to “text pagers” and the first BlackBerry, a two-way pager launched in 1999, with its “druplet” keyboard. Text, in many ways, became the preferred mode of communication in business and between friends."

It struck me that centuries and generations later, a soon to be standard way of communicating world-wide and the way many of us stay close and personal, all started with two very important words:  "Merry Christmas".  And as we know, Immanuel who came, for whom we celebrate Christmas, means that "God is with us". As we start this day and the rest of the month, how uplifting and powerful could it be if we started all of our communications, with "Merry Christmas" as a reminder of why it is that we celebrate this special month and that He is with us, even closer than that next text message.

Reference: Matthew 1:23 (New Living Translation)