In this week’s blog, we are going to take time out from network performance monitoring (NPM as it’s known in the industry) and talk about Thanksgiving.

If you know your history, it may not be news to you that on November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln gave his immortal speech known to all as the Gettysburg Address. The famous oration was given during the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery at the site of one of the Civil War’s most devastating battles where over fifty thousand Americans died in the fields of a small Pennsylvania town.

What you may not know is that in the midst of one of the most pivotal times in American history, President Lincoln wrote a proclamation that declared, going forward, the last Thursday of November would be Thanksgiving Day.

Now we’re sure it wasn’t his intention, and he probably didn’t give it any thought, but this proclamation not only made Thanksgiving an official national holiday, but, by choosing Thursday, one of our greatest and most beloved presidents gave us the four day weekend.

And though the very first football game would not be played for another six years – November 6, 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton – the national holiday paved the way for professional football to be played and enjoyed with family, friends, turkey and stuffing.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1934, the Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears started a new tradition. The game was broadcast over the NBC Radio Network to 94 stations across the United States. (Of course now, you can stream every game, every Sunday, Monday and Thursday on your computer, tablet or phone from just about anywhere you happen to be, but back then, it was a pretty big deal.)

We are spoiled by the marvels of modern technology. In 1934, the family was sitting around an RCA model 128 radio listening to the play by play, trying to picture the touchdown pass from Bronco Nagurski to Bill Hewitt that won the game for the Bears. Now, you’d see the game winner on your phone from six different angles, in super slow motion.

As long as your WiFi connection wasn’t experiencing high latency and unacceptable jitter. In that case, you may have missed the play altogether!

At JitterWorks, we have many things for which we are thankful. We hope you all do as well. Family, friends, prosperity, health. And with your business: low latency, high bandwidth, speedy throughput and no outages.

Happy Thanksgiving from the JitterWorks team.