Why "Hello"?

In the late 1800’s, at the beginning of the Technological Revolution amid the invention of the microphone, the phonograph, the motion picture, and the telephone, and the new language required to understand them, the definition and utilization of two very specifically human words changed. 

One word was Computer - a term that had previously only been used to identify a person who could perform computation, took on an additional meaning: a computing machine. 

The second word was Hello. A relatively ancient and uncommon term, previously meant as a shout of surprise or attention, Thomas Edison pushed to utilize Hello as a greeting specifically for the new and novel Telephone. 

Fast forward a few decades, and it was Computers - both human and machine that took people to the moon; and the machine definition became the primary utilization we understand today.

And as these machines rapidly evolved in line with Moore’s law of 1965, Hello added new implications as well, forming the basis of a simple exercise at the beginning of an education in computer programming. 

“Hello World” became the defacto first lesson learned - from COBOL to Fortran, popularized in 1972 with C, and carried through to the contemporary programming languages today - an introductory proof of new human-computer interaction and bidirectional function.

At the same time, Computers and telephones would be connected, to facilitate new multi-direction communication in the form of ARPANET, and creating the foundation of what would become the modern Internet. The first message ever received, a failed attempt to complete the command LOGIN, was a short string of letters - just “L” and “O” - a string that the engineers creating ARPANET would later come to consider as a more meaningful message: “Hello”.

A short jump to 1984, and another evolution of the Computer would become a pivotal moment for an entirely new era for peoples’ relationship with technology - the unveiling of Jobs’ Macintosh with an on-screen message of one single, simple word - Hello. 

And of course, nothing stopped there - the telephone took on new forms in Cellular technology, and the rise of new devices, and today we carry the equivalent of supercomputers in our pockets - more powerful than the machines that carried humans to the moon, eternally connected via the internet, powering numerous other technologies carried, worn, and utilized - the ever-present Smartphone.

Our computer-centered technological era is one of ongoing transformations; small and massive, positive and negative, slow and rapid. Evolving People, technology, communication, and understanding; interconnected and disparate, parallel and tangential, visible and hidden. 

Like our shared understanding of Computer, and the new meaning of the Telephone, Hello has evolved in lock step, both in utilization and assumptive meaning, from that verbalization of surprise into a ubiquitous greeting - as common and unremarkable as the computer you’re reading this on, whether it’s the phone in your hand or the laptop on your desk.

And just as Computer now includes everything from the server through which this message is delivered to the smartwatch on your wrist - Hello does carry far more meaning than that simple greeting. 

Hello is an exclamatory of Human recognition - demanded by the unexpected, the unseen, the previously unknown.