By Danny Minton

It arrived in the mail somewhere around 1992 or ’93, and my world would never be the same. But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s start at the beginning. 

My first introduction to the computer world began in the early 1970s at a friend’s house, where he played a game called “Pong” on his TV. Magnavox Odyssey had become the first to offer home games that required a plastic overlay on the TV screen. It would be a few years before we would buy our first Atari game console. 

It was sometime in the late ’70s that we bought our first personal computer. It was a TRS 80 Model 1 with two floppy drives that held 5 1/4” disks. Floppy disks were basically two pieces of soft cardboard with a sheet of recordable film inside. From there we graduated to a TRS 80 Model 2 that used 8” floppy disks. My wife would use it for doing bookkeeping for people. They could hold up to a massive 500k (500,000 bytes) of text-based information. To give you perspective, my current cell phone holds 25,600,000,000 bytes of information, including text, pictures, and videos.

This was in the early ‘80s, and the internet was not available to the public. Take a step back to 1971 when a scientist named Ray Tomlinson was working on sending information between two computers within his company. Tomlinson, who passed away in 2016, is considered the inventor of our modern-day email. While mail could be sent between computers within a company, there was no way to send mail to places outside the company, to other companies on different platforms. The problem was how to get the computer system to understand. So Tomlinson decided that, to allow computer systems to communicate, he would use the “@” sign to indicate where email goes. Thus, what we see today in our modern email systems was born.

In the mid-1990s, we received in the mail a disc that would allow us to use our computers and telephones to send mail over the phone to other people’s computers. Letters began to be replaced with immediate communication. People could communicate instantly with others at any time, from any place, to any place. I remember hearing the sound of the computer connecting to the phone line dial tone (no cell phones back then) and making that noise that sounded like the wind blowing. If you were lucky, you’d hear a voice announce, “You’ve Got Mail!” If you want to relive the experience or see it for the first time, watch the 1998 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie, “You’ve Got Mail.”

Likely every one of us who uses email and types that little symbol “@” never gives any thought to why it’s there or who decided to use it, giving us access to the world in an instant. There are a lot of people in this world who do little things that people take for granted. They are not the people who make the nightly news stories. They don’t have reporters banging on their doors for interviews. They do things that help others, not for recognition, but maybe it’s just their job or, better yet, done out of kindness and the desire to make life better for someone else. 

The Hebrews writer, in his chapter on faith, talks about many Old Testament characters who did great things for the Lord. In Hebrews 11:35-40, he leaves the list of names and makes the statement, “Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” 

There were no names, no awards, no books written about them, and no public recognition. These were people who loved the Lord and served Him because that was part of their lives of love for Him. Today, if we are to be like Christ desires, our lives must be lived out in the same way. We serve because we love, not for our own earthly gain. We serve not for recognition by others, but with hearts viewed by God. Christians are to follow the reason that Jesus came. It’s given to us in one of my favorite verses found in the book of Mark. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

Each generation inherits the world the past has left them. You can read this today because of a man in 1971 who you likely never heard of before, who chose the “@” sign to allow the world to communicate instantly. You have hope today because of all the unknown people who died before you to let the world know about the Lord. 

The questions remain. What will I pass on to the next generation? Will they know what Jesus can mean to them through my life, or will they be like the millions today who are failing to see Him in the lives of those who say they believe but fail to live for Him? It is often the little things of being Christ that will make the biggest impact on the world.

Danny Minton, a member of Southern Hills Church of Christ, is a hospital chaplain