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I'm only halfway through this collection of essays. I wasn't aware of the continuity of the "networking" history from telegraph to telephone to internetworking.

I'm only halfway through this collection of essays. I wasn't aware of the continuity of the "networking" history from telegraph to telephone to internetworking. I wonder if this would have happened without the intervention of federal regulators. Maybe federal regulation helped the process, maybe it impeded it. Also, the articles make a lot of the role of individual technicians, advocates and entrepreneurs. I wonder whether the process would have developed in much the same way if those individuals hadn't existed. I.e., was the process driven by historical forces, or by "great men"?

myself248 3y ago
Out of curiosity, did you have a notion of how those various sorts of networks were related or not-related, or was it just a hazy blank spot you never thought about? I'm super curious about this, having grown up in the telephone network, and I keep running into people with interesting misconceptions. (The one that comes first to mind, and which I see quite a bit lately, is that modems and "the internet" were the same thing; people don't realize standalone computers could just call each other directly.)