I’ve recently read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. The book’s been around for a good while, but as the discussion is primarily historical, it’ still relevant.

It sets out a world where a communications revolution is in progress: there’s hackers, online communities, encryption, cheats, commercial killings being made, huge technological leaps (and failures) happened, and many other aspects that we associate with the Internet. The operators were the hackers of their day, highly skilled, scathing of newbies, and in demand. The online communities of the 19th century were formed from their ranks- social networking in it’s infacy took place in the quiet times. They had aliases or nicknames and sign-off signatures, they developed their own languages and shortcuts. This was the world of the telegraph.

Government tried to control the telegraph, at least one battle was decided by it. Encyption was banned and then allowed again, and broken. Messgages were forged, but probably not selling Viagra. Link contention and congestion was an issue at times, but I don’t think any automated traffic managment or shaping was possible- but you can bet any internal messages has the equivalent of QoS tagging. Competing technologies and companies fought for control. One today’s scammers favourites came into existence.

The book’s a good read for anyone interested: so much of what we consider new was in fact at least 100 years old….