4 ms·

How about telegraph? It was used for stock market, I bet you could order some food! 18th century France had net of signaling semaphores, all communication was

• frozencell 4y ago
  Interesting thing is that World Wide Web was founded inside CERN on the Franco-Swiss border near the LHC to share its data with scientists of the world. Before CERN, the French including Louis Pouzin worked on the CYCLADES network, used to build Arpanet and Internet.
• ghaff 4y ago
  And after that you had Telex (and telephone of course). If your bar is that a transaction was agreed to over some sort of network even if money exchanged hands otherwise, it goes back pretty far. Certainly, ordering from a catalog over the phone and giving a credit card number isn't fundamentally different from putting that card number in an email (and, yes, plenty of people used to be fine with that) or entering it in a webform.