If you're interested in this topic, here's a book to read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian

If you're interested in this topic, here's a book to read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet It's been twenty+ years since I last owned a copy, but it was one of my favorite books for a while. The bulk of the material is about pointing out amazing parallels between behaviors on the early internet and century-previous telegraph / wireless networks, but it also discusses physical and network protocols - not, perhaps, in huge depth (I don't remember exactly), but everything mentioned in sibling comments was familiar to me.