Februari 10, 2017
i'm in the small village of jelling, in denmark. and behind me, in that central churchyard, are the jelling stones. they're runestones, historical markers placed there by some ofthe first kings of denmark more than a thousand years ago. once they were painted bright colours, but a millennium of erosion has taken itstoll. that's also why they're now in a climate-controlledglass box
to keep them safe from the weather and fromvandals. the smaller, older stone was placed by kinggorm in honour of his wife, thyra, but the largerone: that was placed by their son, whose name, once you translate it to english, was haraldbluetooth. the inscription honours his parents, and thenit says: "harald, who won for himself all of denmarkand norway and made the danes christian". there's an inscription of jesus on the back. now, obviously, history is messy and complicated,
and if you are raising a memorial runestoneto yourself and to your own achievements, then you gloss over some of the less successfulbits of your history, but still: this is an incredibly important artifact. it's called denmark's birth certificate, it's part of this world heritage site, and it tells the tale of a king who uniteddenmark and norway. a thousand years later, an engineer at intelcalled jim kardach was working on short-range radio technology, the sort of thing that might unite computersand cell phones,
and make all those devices speak one compatibleprotocol. the various names proposed for the varioustechnologies were things like biz-rf, mc-link and low powerrf, which were all a bit unwieldy. kardack heard the story of harald bluetooth from a swedish person that he was workingalongside, and he figured, huh, that'd make a good codenamefor the technology. and that's all it was. a codename.
the official name that was decided later waspersonal area networking, or pan, a name that stuck until three weeks beforelaunch when the lawyers said that they couldn't possiblytrademark something so generic. with no other options, they went with bluetooth. and that logo? harald bluetooth. hb in the runes of the time, more or less. combine those two characters into what's calleda "bind rune", sort of kind of like a signature...
and there's the bluetooth logo. a thousand years ago, a danish king stoodsomewhere near here and ordered those stones to be carved andraised. and now, his name is on our phones.
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