[ih] Early Internet history

[Lawrence Stewart]

Both communications circuits and multiplexing were developed by telegraph systems, but what of routing?

In 1942, George O. Smith wrote a science fiction story called QRM Interplanetary, one of a collection of stories called Venus Equilateral about communications engineers on a relay station.  I rather like the book, but YMMV.

In the prolog to the story, a message from Venus to Detroit is followed along:

"The punched tape from Operator No. 7's machine slid along the line until it entered a coupling machine.

The coupling machine worked furiously. It accepted the tapes from seventy operators as fast as they could set them. It selected die messages as they entered me machine, placing a mechanical preference upon whichever message happened to be ahead of the others on the moving tapes. The master tape moved continuously at eleven thousand words per minute, taking teletype messages from everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere of Venus to Terra and Mars."

(The combined signal goes by radio to the Venus Equilateral relay station)

“The signal was amplified and demodulated. It went into a decoupler machine where the messages were sorted mechanically and sent, each to the proper channel, into other coupler machines. Beams from Venus Equilateral were directed at Mars and at Terra.”

Excerpt From: George O. Smith. “Venus Equilateral.

Now this does not appear to be packet switching, but rather message switching, although perhaps the telegrams were limited in length.

I don’t know how systems like TELEX worked, for telegram routing.  The Wikipedia article suggests it was circuit switched, over POTS, but it is not much of an article. It does claim TELEX as the forerunner of email :)