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Systems like this existed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system https://en.m.wikipe
by apsec112 7y ago
Systems like this existed:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph
but were far too expensive to be used by average citizens like the modern Internet.
- notahacker 7y agoThe Romans themselves had them too: Hadrian's Wall on the border of Roman Britain and Scotland was one place to have a flag-based signalling system which allowed messages to be transmitted within minutes across the entire length of one of the empire's shorter borders. Given the bandwidth limitations when you're only able to transmit a restricted charset and take at least ten seconds to transmit each character and receive acknowledgement, it's hardly surprising that such systems were used to send a limited number of messages of military value rather than as a generalised communication tech, never mind an information retrieval tech.