Comment by tombert
2 years ago
The 500 mile email story is one of my favorite reminders that, fundamentally, we're still governed by the laws of physics. It's funny, but it's also a reminder that, while networks might be very fast, the latency is still going to be governed by the speed of light.
If we are doing classic stories - Grace Hooper and the Nanosecond of wire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_692464
Well laws of physics is what gave us radio in the first place.
Some of my favorite video documentaries are on how it was theorized and then slowly developed over years and decades until they finally got to spark-gap transmitters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_radio
But just imagine listening to spark-gap morse code radio broadcasts for years as amateur and then suddenly someone does a broadcast test of actual voice (violin!) That must have been incredible to hear wirelessly.
24 December 1906 Reginald Fessenden, that was the leap that eventually gave us wifi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Fessenden
I actually like thinking about the exchange of physical information as a network propagation delay, and entanglement/coherence as a distributed consensus algorithm. They're kinda samey from a conceptual point of view (in my amateur opinion)