Lines of communication
From tapping out a telegram to txting yr m8s, tech connects us ever more closely
The dial–up modem… the telegraph was back and this time it was personal
We in the magazine trade generally report on technology rather than invent it. But it was a 1753 article in The Scots Magazine (still published today) that proposed an electric telegraph. By 1816, Navy bosses were offered a working message transmit system, which they rejected as ‘wholly unnecessary’.
Sadly for fans of sailors waving flags, telegraph makers persisted, and cables made the world a smaller place. Mechanical devices to convert text to and from electrical impulses proved unsatisfactory and were replaced by human Morse code operators, a rare case of workers taking robots’ jobs. Another Scottish invention was close behind: through the 20th century, millions of miles of Alexander Graham Bell’s patented twisted–pair copper wires enabled first the telephone and then, by chance, the internet.
Nobody forgets the sound of a dial–up modem. Connecting computers to remote servers, they were adopted early by Apple at the turn of the 80s, and the Mac had a modem port from the start. At speeds of a few kilobytes per minute, users could reach previously arcane services like Usenet newsgroups. Bulletin board systems (BBSes) — essentially, group chats — proliferated. The telegraph was back.
The medium is the message
This was also the age of email, first via BBSes like CIX and then as part of internet access packages, starting with dial–up offered by internet providers in the early 90s. Email then evolved from a system you’d check daily to a service constantly pushing mail to every one of your devices.
TCP/IP networking gave the web open access and unlimited growth, superseding the closed online spaces of CompuServe, AOL, and Apple’s eWorld. It also underpinned new real–time messaging services such as MSN Messenger, and Apple’s iChat. At the same time, cell phones brought SMS texting, and despite Apple’s efforts since 2012 to unify the green and blue bubbles with iMessage, the dichotomy remains. As for voice, reality caught up with science fiction videophones in 2003, with Skype, and felt properly modern with FaceTime in 2010.
What we didn’t see coming was Friends Reunited, founded in Barnet in 2000 and the first platform to combine chat, blogs and news, and extending online communities into the billions, social media didn’t just change how communication worked, but its place in life and society.