The queen testimonial of tech, but not “geek”

On March 26, 1976, a few days before a very young Steve Jobs founded Apple, Queen Elizabeth had already sent her first email. She happened on a visit to a military base in Malvern. It was no accident. There worked Peter Kirstein, the engineer who three years earlier had connected the United Kingdom to the Arpanet network, born in 1969 in the United States. Yes, the Internet did not yet exist and those who used this communication tool were a few dozen pioneers in the world.

On March 26, 1976, the queen entered that club. In reality she had done everything Kirstein: the configuration of the real profile from which to send the email, HME2; and also the text of the first historical message that referred to a new programming language that had been developed in Malvern. “This message, for all Arpanet users, is to announce the availability of Coral 66…”. Nothing really exciting but enough to make history: the first real email.

Many years later, when the invention of a British citizen, Tim Berners Lee’s world wide web, had now turned the Internet into a network for everyone, the queen sent another message in her own historical way: her first tweet: “And It is a pleasure to inaugurate the Information Age exhibition at the Science Museum and I hope people will enjoy a visit here. Elizabeth R. “. Compared to the prehistoric email of 1976, that gesture was actually less striking: at that time, it was October 2014, Twitter was already very used and in the meantime the queen had already launched the family website; and the official YouTube channel, with a precious video of a Christmas in 1957.

The chroniclers of Buckingham Palace then spent a lot of time investigating the story of a mysterious iPod that the queen would have bought as early as 2005. The thing emerged in 2009, during an official visit by Barack and Michelle Obama who had thought of giving the queen own an iPod, however, only discovering at the time of delivery that the queen already had one.

All these anecdotes have earned Elisabetta a reputation as a tech-savvy, expert and passionate about technology; she reiterated during Covid because she held her meetings on Zoom. However, it would be a mistake to describe her as a “geek”: there are recent photographs that show her talking to Prime Minister Boris Johnson using a very old telephone. And the emails, she told herself, she dictated not wrote them.

Epperò the queen had understood the value of technology. And the importance of using it to tell the people about her that it was not useless or abstruse. It was important. And she was the best testimonial.