this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
1619 points (99.6% liked)
Microblog Memes
5778 readers
2225 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Remember when email was useful? I remember when it was magical!
Time for a story from the ancient times. I had this idea and asked my professor for advice. He said he knew a person on the other side of the world who would know all about it. “This is his ‘email’ address.”
I had never heard about ‘email’ so I needed to learn what it was and how to send one. I wrote my message and off it went. The very next morning I had a reply. One of the best experts on a topic I was keen about had shared their thoughts from the other side of the world, just like that.
In that time, a long time ago as you’ll appreciate, that interaction was magical.
In an instant I understood the power of the Usenet. A while later and with a couple of additional protocols they started calling that the Internet.
Heh, that's nostalgia. I always wonder what the young people of today's equivalent will be. Probably something quantum.
There is no equivalent, because it's not new, and even if it was, it's monetized and manipulative. The internet back then was wide open, free as fuck, and completely new!
I was specifically referring to the ability to communicate in writing at that speed. I guess the telegraph technically existed as well, but it was expensive and awkward.
And couldn't reach across oceans, required special training, and only accommodated short messages because of the tedious nature of signaling.
You could definitely send telegraphs overseas, and sending or receiving them required no training.
If you mean paying someone to send them, then sure. But it required learning Morse code, and learning to use a keyer.
You couldn't send them overseas until after ~~the invention of radio. Before that the signal traveled along a wire~~ they laid the transatlantic cable.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid down in 1854 and radio waves weren't even theorized until 1873... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio#History
I had no idea radio was such a recent discovery.
Whoops!
No worries, we can't all know everything all the time.
I kinda suspected I might be wrong about that as I was typing it, and then I was like "Nah! That's just silly. Of course they didn't run a cable across the entire Atlantic Ocean in the 1800's!". But I was wrong. That's actually really impressive.
During a short window, a samurai could've faxed president Lincoln (though I believe the samurai and Lincoln would have had to be in the same country)
I remembered this article if you're interested in how we lay cable underwater today. It's even more wild since it's fiberoptic cable. https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships
You should look into how it was done. Weirdly enough, it's pretty similar to how we lay cable now.
The only way you were keying in a telegram yourself is if you worked for them.
What's writing? Is that a new feature on TikTok?