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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.
I was reading something recently that discussed the US Postal Service in the late 19th century. In some major cities, like New York and Boston, the mail used to come as much as five times a day. That meant you could write to someone (local, served from the same Post Office) in the early morning, have it picked up in the first round, delivered in the second, have their reply picked up in the third, and delivered on the fourth. (And you could even send a reply back in the final pickup for delivery the next morning.) That's pretty good -- some people I know don't even check their email that often!
If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Apparently where Terry Pratchett got the clacks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacks
If it was "wireless and without need for electricity", then it was not electronic mail
Particles, stuff that matters.
Native American smoke signals date back to pre-Columbian times.
Torches and and other forms of optical telegraphy date back to ancient times.
Thanks to the seminal work of J. Hofmueller and his colleagues, modern flag semaphores can also be used to encapsulate IP datagrams. Presumably, this is more efficient than delivering the same traffic by animal transport but less efficient than by wire or radio.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Tom Standage's book covered this quite well.
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
Link
Was the Optical Telegraph networked described by the clueless politicians of the time as a "series of flags"?
The Great Wall in China put similar means to use hundreds of years earlier.
:)
Colored flags, whistling arrows, fires & hand signals all worked as part of a communication chain that spanned greater distances as well (6,400 km).
And 'man-in-the-middle' attacks were usually over before they began
BEACONS of Gondor, for Sauron's sake.
BEACONS.
If you can't afford a dictionary, rednecks, at least Google.
you had me at #!
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)
Before the semaphore telegraph a man could travel faster than information. Am I the only one who thinks that's just really cool? The whole concept of being able to race across the globe faster than events is completely alien to our current existence.
Hmmm... Let me put it this way; Before the semaphore telegraph, the world was split into a very large number of simultaneous but completely separate realities. As soon as that telegraph came into existence those realities began merging into one.
Article: Humans or horses can maintain a speed of 5 or 6 kilometres an hour for long distances.
It may defy common sense, but a runner in top shape can almost match the pace of a horse over long distances. There used to be a yearly contest in England, and a human sometimes won. Our ancestors used to chase down pray by outlasting them in the heat (some isolated tribes still do). Our sweating system keeps us cooler than hairy animals. However, it may be more economical to wear out a horse than a human. Plus, a horse can carry more.
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 compiler is more than capable of doing this transformation. The real reason is because the vast majority of algorithms are easier to describe with the first index as zero -- this was a lesson learned from FORTRAN, which started indexing at 1.
The irony of having to define the word "Wanker" to a bunch of mostly American nerds.
Deleted
actually, the story was more interesting
-Rothschilds get information early
-other people know rothschilds get the information early
-rothschilds dump all their stock
-everyone else dumps their stock
-stock crashes
-rothschilds buy everything
massive stock manipulation, but I guess that was legal back then.
(or at least this is the version I heard)