[ih] Comments re the packet radio discussion

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 27-Apr-26 14:13, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote:
> I once heard that in Victorian England, at least some parts of it, the post
> was delivered four times a day.

That was certainly the case within London, but it wouldn't work intercity.
(The Penny Post was introduced in 1840.)

There are surviving letters between Babbage and Lovelace, for example, that
indicate quite rapid interaction. But they were rich people who could likely
order a servant to deliver a letter on demand.

I seem to remember that some Sherlock Holmes stories indicate very rapid
postal deliveries within London.

     Brian

> Thus you *could* carry on a lengthy debate
> with someone that only took a few days. Does anyone have a link to data
> like that?
> 
> I was also wondering what the average time was to get a Reply to a question
> under that system. Nowadays it *might *be only seconds sometimes, but for a
> lot of people the average email response time is still measured in days.
> 
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 12:46 AM Yannis KOROVESIS/COROVESIS via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> Going further back than the Victorians wikipedia has the following about
>> "fryktoria" (translated from the Greek original ) as you suspect:
>>
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>> https://el-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%CE%A6%CF%81%CF%85%CE%BA%CF%84%CF%89%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%B1?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=el&_x_tr_pto=wapp
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>>   Yannis
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>>   On Apr 22, 2026, at 5:14 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
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>>   I recently visited Tom Standage’s blog post about The Victorian Internet <
>> https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/the-victorian-internet/> and
>> noticed that he mentioned that Andrew Odlyzko <
>> https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/> had read it.  Odlyzko’s name
>> also came up in some literature about the origins of Tier 1 ISPs.  He used
>> to post here occasionally.  You might find some of the Internet system
>> level analysis you’re looking for in his papers.
>>
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>>
>>   --gregbo
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