Stats for nerds
2recommend
9mentions
9people
2015–2021years
22% recommend78% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If anyone's interested in learning more about the history of the telegraph, I recommend reading The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage[1]. It's an approachable and fairly short book (200 pages) that tells the stories of all of the people involved with it.
If you want to know what it was like to be a telegraph operator, check out this cheesy 19th century novel about a romance that develops over the telegraph, called Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and dashes[2]. I don't know how accurate it is, but it was certainly entertaining.
[1] https://www.kobo.com/CA/en/ebook/the-victorian-internet-1
- I read Wired Love a while ago and was impressed with how light and easy to read it was, the whole thing felt really quite contemporary.
- You may also be familiar with the 1879 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes" - perhaps filling a similar fictional niche in its time that "You've Got Mail" did nearly 120 years later.
- I'm not sure that's material to my point, but assuming you're just starting a tangent, I'd disagree. They had replies.
It was not as immediate and exciting as modern technology, but it was way more exciting than what previously existed. People even fell in love by telegraph. See, for example, the 1880 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes": https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love-romance...
- > In the age of sail, sending international mail was no easy matter. A sealed note would be left with some ship going in roughly the right direction, and then luck more than anything would decide the outcome. This was before steam ships, before the rail road and the telegraph, and it could well take a year or more before the sender eventually recieved a reply. The preserved letters from Lossius are full of references to other letters that never made it across the oceans.
This was striking to read; it's absolutely impossible for me to imagine a pre-telegraph world with such utterly slow communications where people nevertheless had friends and family separated by years of latency.
It makes me appreciate the significance of the electric telegraph and of long-range communication that is not limited by the speed of any physical vehicle. I recently read a short romance novel (called "Wired Love") published in 1880 about two telegraph operators who meet online (well, on the wire), use spare time on the wire to talk (and flirt) with each other; and eventually fall in love -- before even having met each other IRL or knowing each other's IRL names! There's even a quite modern impersonation that happens -- someone else steals the identifier of the operator the main character is in love with, and proceeds to be an rude asshole to her. Almost like IRC nick stealing, except a century or so earlier! The antics involving the telegraphs were, amusingly enough, the least antiquated part of the novel, as there's an entirely shocking amount of aspects of Internet communication/relationship practices that have pretty clear equivalents in that telegraph-era book. For example, the main character disdains the telephone and prefers the elegant and more technically-involved telegraph, she and her partner "clasp hands" over the wire in the same way people do "/me hugs" on IRC, she gets called crazy for laughing to herself and "smiling at vacancy" while telegraphing with her online lover -- and after they've met IRL, her suitor even installs a private telegraph wire from her bedroom to his. There's something quite endearing about reading an old novel and realising that the people with access to real-time text chat more than a century ago might have used it in quite similar ways as people use it today.
- Technical:
Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer by Sandi Metz
Fiction:
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer - I saw this mentioned in a HN comment[0].
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530693
Edited to fix formatting and add a missing book.
