[ih] Nit-picking an origin story

[Brian E Carpenter]

Excellent list, Joe. To the pre-electric era, I'd add smoke signals and alpenhorns, and I'm sure there were others in various cultures around the world.

I'd also insert Baudot and Murray after Morse. They brought in 5-bit binary encoding instead of on/off encoding, and Murray invented both multiplexing and CR/LF.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 17-Aug-25 12:40, touch--- via Internet-history wrote:
> 
>> On Aug 16, 2025, at 5:15 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> the scope of my original query was meant to be about much closer -- and possibly competitive or complementary -- milestones: automated, shared (wide-area) digital communications.
>>
>> So, for example, telegraph signal/smoke fires, heliography and the like play into the larger... picture.
> 
> I included a history when I taught intro to networking.
> 
> Couriers			Spoken/written language (30,000 BC)
> Pigeons			2900 BC, Egypt
> Beacons			1200 BC, Troy
> Calling posts		400 BC, Persia
> Heliographs		400 BC, Greece
> Flags			400 BC, Greece
> Hooke semaphore	1680s (shutters and symbols)
> Chappe’s telegraph	1790s (arms) with time sync, collision management, priority flow control, and error recovery
> Edelcrantz		1790s (just shutters, inspired by Chappe)
> Cooke/Wheatstone	1830s magnetic needles
> Morse			1830s electromagnetic relays
> Morse 			1850s teleprinter (like a stock ticker)
> Bell				1870s phone
> Marconi			1890s RF
> Tube amps		1900s
> Transistor		1950s
> Laser			1950s
> Satellite			1960s
> 
> As you note, the adjectives are the key, as with most superlatives.
> 
> For "computer networking", I would say Sage is the first in the 1950s, with SABRE (reportedly inspired by SAGE) and telephone switches (arguably remote machine-machine) not far behind in the early 1960s, all AFAICT predating ARPAnet.
> 
> Joe
> 
> 
> 
> 
>