[ih] Comments re the packet radio discussion

[Bob Purvy]

I'm wondering what the curve of response times looked like then vs. now. A
research topic to assign some hapless grad student.

Certainly there are some email interactions like Dave and Steve had that
were completely impossible in Victorian London. There were a few, where
both parties had servants as Brian said, that approached that speed
(although not matching it).

Still: quite often nowadays you don't get a Reply for days. I'm wondering
what the mean and the median were then, and what they are now.

On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 2:16 PM Brian E Carpenter <
brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>   Yannis
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>   On Apr 22, 2026, at 5:14 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>   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.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>   --gregbo
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
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