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Email In the 18th Century
morphovar forwards a writeup in Low-tech Magazine recounting an almost-forgotten predecessor to email and packet-switched messaging: the optical telegraph. The article maps out some of the European networks but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s. Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy. "More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an airplane — wireless and without need for electricity. The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers ... placed 5 to 20 kilometers apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. A message could be transmitted from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour's time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month's time to do the same."
Did spam make it across these networks as well?
"Having trouble with the smell of thine donkey? Only have the one mistress? Try friar pete's ol' fashioned elixer de skunke, it's new lead based formula works wonders like that Jesus guy over there"
Gondor needs help.
If it was "wireless and without need for electricity", then it was not electronic mail
Particles, stuff that matters.
"S... E... N... D... send, F... A... R... C... E... S... farces?!"
In other news, NTP is now looking for someone to sue over this infringing technology.
please watch this space for 3 hours in order to view it
my comment is currently being transmitted from schenectady to poughkeepsie and the bad weather is interfereing with the candles staying lit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Was the Optical Telegraph networked described by the clueless politicians of the time as a "series of flags"?
No worries. Antibiotics will clear that right up.
Looks like the Victorians could copy and transmit data faster than Windows Vista!
Actually, the semaphore-based network wasn't the first on in Europe. Before it, there was a simpler network based around mutexes, but it wasn't very popular because it got quite bothersome once you had more than two people communicating. Still it was a major step forward from the previous concurrent networks where the non-locked shared message space meant that if two people broadcasted at the same time they'd overwrite each other's messages.
Much later, North America would see an experimental monitor-based optical messaging network, but the cost of keeping hundreds of big CRTs powered on all the time quickly put an end to it.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Mmmm, bacons of Gondor. Sizzling fatty meats of Frodo!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
network consisted of a chain of towers... placed 5 to 20 kilometers apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher [worker], looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain...
Back then when a "node was infected with a virus", it was literal.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you semaphore fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a semaphore tower (a 1860/300 w/64 flags) for about 20 weeks now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one city on the east coast to another city. 20 weeks. At home, on my dovecote running Columba livia domestica, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this semaphore tower, the same operation would take about 2 weeks. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, the newspaper will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my inkwell is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various semaphore towers, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a semaphore tower that has run faster than its dove counterpart, despite the semaphore towers' faster signalling architecture. My pigeonry with 8 Columba palumbus' runs faster than this 300 flag-position machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the semaphore tower is a superior machine.
Semaphore addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a semaphore tower over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The irony of having to define the word "Wanker" to a bunch of mostly American nerds.
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Similar to the upcoming US election results