Telecommunications History

Once upon a time, we did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System

Well, that's not new with computers or the internet. We had that ever since the analog telephone system. Even telegraphs before that for a smaller set of points and routes.

You seriously need to learn about the history of the telecoms industry, going back to the days when they did exactly what you say they're not going to do.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_StrowgerNothing is happening now that hasn't happened before. People forget, is all.

"instant-speed trans-Atlantic communication" started with the laying of the first trans-atlantic telegraph cables in the 1860's, and allowed machine to machine communications, messaging, shopping, there are even cases of people marrying after meeting over the telegraph. Radio was in use by the 1920's and a smartphone is basically a personal 2-way radio with pretensions!I think a lot of modern tech is really just 19th century tech done (a lot) better, smaller, faster, more

You are forgetting about the telegraph! And before that, semaphores.

This wasn’t true in the early (and in some countries even quite recent) history of the telephone. Having to use a phone provided by the phone company was the norm, which prevented the use of modems and forced early BBS and Internet users to use (much less efficient) acoustic couplers.Worldwide direct dialing is also a relatively recent innovation in the history of the telephone.Maybe we’re just in a similar phase of technological development?

The telegraph just as disruptive in it's time as the Internet was in the 1990s. Before the telegraph, messages took days, if not weeks to reach cross-country. Every telco since then, (Including the Internet) has been an extension or abstraction of it. Awesome article.

It did evolve quite a bit. There were machines to automatically encode/decode messages. You could even plug a keyboard to it. Some people (Morse himself) had such a device at home.Routing was a thing, but there were some limitations of how many communications could happen at the same time on the same wire (Baud was the one who actually worked on that), making scaling difficult.The important thing to understand is at the end of the century, as bandwidth, infrastructure scaling, reliabi

Starting with telegraph to telephones to first computer.

Fun fact: This is how TV and telephone once worked. Except with microwaves.https://www.wired.com/2015/03/spencer-harding-the-long-lines...