Hashtag inventor is from New Hampshire

I’ve long been a fan of the Internet History Podcast which is, you’ll be surprised to hear, a podcast about the history of the Internet.

The most recent episode (listen here) has a long interview with Chris Messina, who was involved in lots of interesting things like launching the Firefox browser but is best known as the “inventor” of the hashtag for social media.

Turns out he’s from Bedford, New Hampshire. He never says whether he went to public high school – he graduated around 1999, when Bedford kids still went to Manchester West – but mentions being part of the FIRST Robotics program and talks about how Dean Kamen lived “about 10 minutes” from him.

Another bit of New Hampshire tech history (although Messina had to leave New Hampshire to get anything done – first at Carnegie Mellon, then the California Bay Area).