[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 48, Issue 13

[Jack Haverty]

In high school I had a teacher who was enamored of Roman history. So I 
learned a bit about how Roman society worked, and in particular wartime 
behavior.  The Romans (and many others of the age) had extensive 
communications networks, using runners, ships, birds, fires, and 
anything else handy to send information over long distances.   Their 
networks had a serious problem with latency - days or weeks in transit 
being a common problem.

One of the wartime techniques addressed the risk of the enemy spies 
("intelligence agencies") intercepting messages, e.g., between generals 
in Africa and the government in Rome.    The sender would create a 
message on a scroll.   The communications wetware (slaves) would then 
rip the scroll into pieces so that none of the pieces contained enough 
information to be useful to an enemy.   The pieces would then be sent 
separately, even by different means available, to the destination.   
Some might go by ships, some by runners, on different routes.  At the 
destination, the pieces would be gathered together and the original 
scroll reconstructed.   Multiple copies of scrolls could be sent if the 
routes were especially dangerous.

That sure sounds like "packet switching" to me...although the 
terminology was created as computers arrived, the concepts were used in 
ancient time.

I recall Vint explaining, at some early Internet meeting, that the word 
"protocol" is derived from the Greek "protokolon", which was the section 
at the beginning of a scroll that described exactly what the scroll 
contained and other relevant "metadata".   Today we call them "headers".

All of this history was in my head, and probably many others, as we 
built the Arpanet, Internet, et al.   But I suspect the basic ideas were 
around even before the Greco-Roman age.

Jack Haverty

PS - that TV show I referenced was interesting because it goes well 
beyond the basic ideas of digital communications, and explores how 
humans reacted to it with "social media" and such.   It's here -- 
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hgmp8   In the end, the inventor 
concludes it was all a bad idea.....