[ih] MAP & BBN

[Joly MacFie]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 1:19 AM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> But you are correct that TELEX/TWX/Autodin, and the WesternUnion
> bicyclist/telegraphic hybid network, and Marconi radiograms were all a
> prior art that may have and should have informed early email development
> even if it was called 'mail'.
>

I watched (via webcast) Tim Wu speak at the recent Legal Hackathon at
Brooklyn Law School. His theme, based on his Master Switch book, was that
many inventions are achieved by amateurs or outsiders as a result of
unconstrained thinking, something impossible in incumbents.. IIRC he gave
the example of Bell and the telephone - saying the telegraph incumbents
ignored the whole idea of voice over wire because a) they thought it an
impractical gimmick, but more importantly their conviction that residential
telegraph terminals were the future. Wu: "in other words, email".

Weren't electric text communications popularly known as "cables" in the
early 20th C?

j
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