On May 24th, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the message, "What hath God wrought?"
from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol building in Washington, DC to his
assistant in Baltimore, MD. In that simple act, the era of electronic
communications was born.

I'm a great fan of first beginnings. They have an enormous amount of portent
and promise, and simple things like the first message ever sent by reflecting
a laser off of a satellite ("NASA. Rah. Rah. Rah.") truly tickle me. For our
particular products, I keep all of our customers' first reports that they
send me, no matter how primitive they may be as compared to what they will
later produce. Other first beginnings are even more portentous and hold far
greater promise, such as:

     http://aics-research.com/sojourn3.html

Richard Feynman once said that "Innovation is hard." And because it is hard,
people often well recognize the portent and importance of what they are doing
at the time they're doing it, no matter how primitively it might be initially
implemented. Morse certainly understood the promise of what he was doing --
and he saved the paper tape of the first telegraphic transmission between two
distant cities. His telegraph caused raised bumps to be inscribed on a paper
tape, which was later decoded by an operator. An image of that tape, as
decoded by Morse himself, is on the Library of Congress' web site at:

     http://lcweb2.loc.gov/mss/mcc/019/0001.gif

The message, chosen by the daughter of a friend, Annie G. Ellsworth (as
you'll see on the tape), is from the Bible and is the verse from Numbers
XXIII:23

Wirt Atmar