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

[Jack Haverty]

Agreed.   I've often wondered what the ratio is between "inventions" 
which introduced new concepts and those which just applied old concepts 
using a new technology.

Another interesting comparison over a timeline would be the economics 
aspects of communications.  Every mechanism I know about over history 
has had some incremental "cost" to the sender of data. It cost you 
something to communicate.  Telegrams cost money to send.  Scrolls 
consumed the time of your ships and couriers, and your slaves to do the 
copying, instead of tending the herds and crops.

Until the Internet... where I can send as much data as I want, at no 
additional cost to me.   Or as many emails as I like, with no difference 
in my communications bill.  Maybe we missed an important part of the 
concept?

Jack Haverty


On 11/28/23 13:06, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 11/28/2023 9:34 AM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> 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.
>
>
> For any interesting technology, it is probably useful for a timeline 
> to distinguish basic concept from forms of implementation.  (One can, 
> of course, at other aspects of distinction.)
>
> For this thread, distinguishing the concept of packet switching from 
> the service implementation might note manual (smoke, semaphore etc.) 
> vs. electric transmission (telegraph, computer), clear vs. 
> coded/encrypted, and routing that is manual  vs. automated.
>
> I think tht covers the range of mechanisms that have been discussed in 
> this thread.
>
> d/
>