>> The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a challenge between 93 year old
>> telegraph operator transmitting morse code to an 82 year old with a
>> manual typewriter, and youngsters sending a text message. The text
>> message was received 18 seconds after the message was already on >> paper.
>>formatting link
> Sure, but much of that 18 seconds was in network transmission time,
> but the telegraph has a (by comparison) severely limited "network"
> Let's try another test; let's send the same message to each of five
> different recipients randomly selected out of a possible thousand
> recipients, then travel to a randomly selected location within two
> city blocks and send a new message to those five people again.
> Anybody want to bet that by the time the telegraph operator gets his
> system reconnected to send to the second recipient, the phone user
> will have finished walking to the randomly selected location (sending
> the first batch of five messages while walking?)
Press wires and railroad wires were routinely set up to send to multiple locations. Many Western Union and other telegraph wires were set up the say way. They were largely replaced by teletypewriter because of the costs involved in having a receiving operator in each of perhaps hundreds of locations.
Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com