OMG! Morse code started chat rooms
In March 2006, a college dropout named Jack Dorsey finished coding a site for Internet users to post 140-character messages.
It was called twttr.
just setting up my twttr - jack (jack) March 21, 2006
Dorsey and co-founders eventually added vowels to the service, forming Twitter. The name made total sense.
“The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds,’” Dorsey once said. “And that’s exactly what the product was.”
Internet histories record Dorsey’s first tweet as a pivotal moment in the rise of social media. They are wrong. The history of social media began almost two centuries earlier, on May 24, 1844, when Samuel F.B. Morse, a painter turned inventor, sent a message from Washington to Baltimore.
Back then, Morse wasn’t typing with his thumbs. He was tapping dots and dashes “on a device of cogs and coiled wires,” as one historian later put it. While the telegraph had been around in idea and rudimentary form, Morse devised a way to use electricity for sending a series of codes signaling letters of the alphabet.
Suddenly, the country began shrinking in ways that sound distinctly familiar.
“Telegraph operators could chat with each other by tapping on their keys,” the English journalist Tom Standage wrote in Writing on the Wall: Social Media — the First 2,000 Years. “All the operators along the line could hear everything that was transmitted and join in the unofficial banter, in effect occupying a single, shared chat room.”
There were early versions of OMG: “G M” meant “good morning,” “SF D” meant “stop for dinner.” Standage writes that telegraphers played chess and checkers using Morse code, often becoming friends without ever meeting. “Romances between operators who met each other online were not unknown,” he wrote. “Such was the sense of online camaraderie that some operators in remote places preferred to commune with their friends on the wires than with the local people.”
Though he studied science at Yale, Morse didn’t see his future in a lab. He wanted to paint.
Portraits were his thing. “My price for profiles is one dollar,” he told his parents, “and everybody is willing to engage me at that price.” And he was talented, later painting noted portraits of Presidents John Adams and James Monroe, inventor Eli Whitney, and even Marquis de Lafayette, the American Revolutionary War figure.
In 1832, after a painting trip to Europe, Morse had returned home by ship, stumbling into a conversation with passengers about Michael Faraday’s electromagnet. If there was one academic subject that interested him at Yale, it was math. “When Morse came to understand how the electromagnet worked, he speculated that it might be possible to send a coded message over a wire,” according to a Library of Congress history.
Morse began experimenting with batteries and wires but quickly realized his painting career had not prepared him to tinker with electricity.
He sought help at University of the City of New York from chemistry professor Leonard D. Gale. It would take them nearly a decade to perfect the technology, which spread rapidly across the country and then to Europe, for use in wars, business, newspapers and so much else before being replaced by telephones, fax machines, computers and MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other modern communications.