Tell us about the olden days

The previous post talked in generalities about how the web and internet may or may not have changed how we communicate and live. To go along with that, I thought it might be interesting to consider some specific examples. Since these are drawn from personal experience, this post will show my age more than most do, but so be it. If you find it amusing to append old man to the questions here, well, I don't suppose I can stop you.

I'm going to answer these on the assumption that you have no memory of anything before, say, the 1990s, so please bear with me if some of this is already obvious. I'm honestly not sure how much of this will be "wow, I didn't know that" to a typical reader and how much will be "well, yeah, no kidding." Also, though I'll generally write in past tense, many of the things I'll mention are still true. I'll call that out here and there, but not necessarily everywhere, so if you find yourself thinking "but ... they still have those", you're probably right.

If nothing else, this post will probably serve as a reminder that as much as I grumble about kidstechnology these days, a lot of this stuff is nice to have.

What did you do before GPS and mapping apps?

I grew up in a midwestern town that was built on a grid. The north/south blocks were long (eight to a mile) and the east-west blocks were short (twelve to a mile), so most addresses were on the north/south streets. First street was at the south end, running east-west, then second street and so on. The north-south streets had names in alphabetical order from east to west.

The first digit or digits of an address on a north-south street were the number of the nearest numbered street to the south. The last two digits of the address were 00 for the northeast corner lot and 01 for the northwest corner and generally increased by 4 per house from there. If I lived at 1234 Elm street and I knew your address was 2133 Maple, I knew to go nine blocks north (just over a mile) and, um, several blocks west, and your house would be on the west side of the street, toward the north end.

The main thoroughfares were a mile apart, since they'd started out as section roads, so you knew you could take 3rd, 11th, 19th or (later, as things got built out) 27th to get across town from east to west, and Cedar, Oak or (again later) Agate to get from north to south. A lot of towns were laid out using some version of this kind of scheme, and for that matter so were a lot of cities. San Francisco is a notable example -- a lot of folks would have built streets to follow the contour of the hills (to be fair, some do).

I say "were" and "could", but of course they didn't rename or renumber anything just because GPS came along, though it does certainly seem to matter less now. I currently live in an area with a large-scale grid of section roads, and many of the towns are on small-scale grids, but I've never bothered to learn the exact numbering schemes, even in my own neighborhood, because GPS is just easier. I do know the section roads reasonably well.

My first answer, in other words, was "you just got to know your way around town" and "the addresses were set up to make that easier".

That worked fine until I moved to an area on the East Coast where nothing was on a grid. At that point MapQuest was around, but I didn't have a smartphone. I ended up doing a fair bit of printing out directions off the web, trying to mostly memorize the way before starting out, peeking at the directions while stopped at stoplights and keeping a weather eye out for street signs and house numbers.

And getting lost fairly often.

Gradually, I learned the main roads and how they connected together, and how the smaller connectors connected to those, and where the main places I wanted to get to related to all that, and things got easier. People would also give general directions like "It's near Chestnut and Amethyst where the main library is. Turn left on Locust Street after the light and Smith Court will be a few blocks down". If you already knew where the main library was, or even where Chestnut and Amethyst were, you had a pretty good shot.

There were also some clues like the common pattern of naming a main road after a city it was headed toward. For example, Richmond Road in Twickenham goes toward Richmond and Mortlake Road in Richmond goes toward Mortlake, and it's probably not a coincidence that in both cases you're heading toward London proper (there is no Twickenham Road in Richmond or Richmond Road in Mortlake, but on the other hand Chapel Hill Road in Durham goes toward Chapel Hill, where it becomes Durham Road in Chapel Hill ...).

Later, I realized that learning the main road/smaller road pattern was something I'd dealt with before before, traveling in Europe, except that instead of main streets it was usually the public transit system -- get on the subway at your stop, follow the subway maps to your destination stop, find your actual destination from there.

My main problem then was that I don't have a great sense of overall direction. If a road takes a bend here and a curve there, I might think I'm headed pretty much the same direction I was before, when in fact I've turned almost 90 degrees.

So I really like having GPS available as a backup, even if I wish there were an easy way to say "yeah, I know this part, start giving me directions when we get to this part and just let me listen to my music until then."

The other part, of course, particularly before MapQuest, was knowing how to read a street or road map, which seems to be something of a lost art, a clear sign that GPS is just plain easier (particularly if your brain doesn't deal well with maps).

For long trips you had the Rand McNally Road Atlas, which showed all the interstates, federal highways and main state roads, along with cities and towns, with mileage shown on each segment. The distance between one town or exit and the next was shown as a number halfway between in one color. Some of those waypoints had a special dot in a different color, and the distance between those with special dots was shown in that color, so you didn't have to add up all the segments in between. There was also a schematic depiction of the interstate system with mileage numbers.

In other words, the road atlas encoded exactly the same kind of edge-weighted graph that mapping software uses, and you could use that to figure out the shortest route from point A to point B along main roads. If you had time, you could look for cutoffs on secondary roads. If you were adventurous, you could try to find local shortcuts and hope that at least you could find your way back to something that was on the map.

You might also carry smaller-scale state or regional maps, which you could get at any gas station (maybe still can). If you were staying in a city for a while, you'd pick up a city map, too. The road atlas also included maps of the main roads in most cities, and you could usually get by with that if you were just passing through [re-reading, I realize I forgot to mention that you could also ... stop and ask directions].

Any of these maps would be overlaid with a square grid with numbers in one direction and letters in the other, and there would be an index, so you could find out that Springfield was in square 5A and quickly find exactly where it was and figure out how to get there.

When I lived in the LA area, the Thomas Brothers map worked basically the same way (as does London's A to Z, along with, I'm sure, many, many others), so you could figure out that to get to the Sherman Oaks Galleria you take Wilshire to the 405, get off at the Ventura exit, hang a left on Sepulveda and a right onto Ventura and there you are.

But what about traffic? To this day, many local radio stations will provide frequent updates on road conditions and traffic, and make money off this information by selling ads. Just sayin'

Summing this all up

• Many places were designed to be easy to get around
• Pretty much any city has a system of main roads, secondary roads and side streets that you can just learn if you need to
• There are maps available at several scales. Larger scale maps include distance information and pretty much all have grids and indexes.
• Getting around is easier now, but it wasn't really that hard before smartphones and GPS, because there was already quite a lot of infrastructure to make it easier, particularly if maps are friendly to your brain.

What did you do before cell phones and texting?

Cell phones may have had the most noticeable effect on day-to-day life of all the web/internet/telecommunications advances of the past few decades.

Besides the clothes and hairstyles, one sure-fire sign that a movie is old (or the screenwriter is a bit behind the times) is a plot device that depends on a phone call. Our hero needs to get in touch with someone urgently. Can they make it to a payphone? Will the person they're calling be at home or at their desk? Will the line be busy? Will the wrong person answer the phone? Or maybe the right person is at home but they're afraid to pick up the phone because it might be the villain calling? If the hero had to leave a message, will the other person get home to check their answering machine in time? Will the wrong person overhear them leaving the message on the machine?

None of these really works today because

• Phones are now associated with people, while they used to be associated with places
• Today's phones can do more. For most of the landline era there was no caller ID and most phones could only handle one call at a time
• Messages can now be stored in the cloud rather than locally on analog tape

Since a landline is associated with a place, the vast majority of households had a single phone line, though there might be multiple phones in the house connected to it. If you called the number for that phone, you were calling the house. Someone would answer ("Hello?"), you'd say who you were ("Hi, it's Dave") and, if you wanted to talk to someone else at the house, who you wanted to talk to ("Could I speak to Earl?"). If that person was somewhere else, you could ask the person you were talking to to leave a message.

You could also just hang out and chat with them -- if you know Earl, you probably know Chris, the housemate, or Chris's good friend Sam, who doesn't live there but hangs out enough that everyone's comfortable with them answering the phone. The chance of talking to someone other than the person you were calling for wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though of course it could be.

The other half of a phone being associated with a place was that if you wanted to make a call, you had to get to a phone. That's why there were payphones (still are, here and there, I'm pretty sure). Or you could stop by a friend's house and ask to borrow their phone. In a pinch, you might be able to drop into a nearby business and ask to use their phone, but it had better be an emergency.

You could also call to a payphone, since they each had their own number, but that was pretty rare, to the point that a lot of people weren't aware that you could even do that. You'd mostly see it done in a movie, where the villain tells the hero to wait for a call at the payphone at 12th and Main, and some innocent bystander steps in to make a call at just the wrong moment.

But that also meant that if you were away from a phone, no one could call you and no one expected to be able to. Earl's not home? Cool, I'll try later, or maybe I'll run into him. Likewise, no one expected you to be able to call them. The most likely answer to "Why haven't they called me back??" was "They're not home yet."

Honestly, this was kinda nice. I still miss it from time to time. Sure, you can unplug today, but it's not the default.

Voicemail today is mostly the same as it was fifty years ago. You could record whatever outgoing message you liked. When someone called your phone and the answering machine was turned on, it would play your outgoing message, beep and start recording whatever was on the line until the connection ended or (I'm pretty sure) until you picked up the phone on your end.

Depending on how a switch was set, it would also play what it was recording on its speaker, so you could hear the message that was being left. People who were at home could and did screen calls that way, so leaving a message might look like:

... Please leave your message at the beep

Hey, it's me ...

[picking up phone] Oh hey! I was hoping you'd call

but it might also look like:

... Please leave your message at the beep

Hey, it's me ...

[muttering to self and not picking up phone] Yeah well you can just take that phone and ...

... and I just wanted to say ... again ... I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry

Sure, you can still screen calls and now even block people (which you couldn't do), but there's something special about listening in in real time.

Again, the main difference is that the answering machine is tied to a landline, which is tied to a place, so typically you'd check your answering machine for messages when you got home and either turn it off, or leave it on and screen calls. If you turned it off, you had to remember to turn it back on the next time you left ("Oh no, I'm sorry you couldn't leave a message. I forgot to turn my machine on."). It was also possible to access your voicemail by calling in and using a Touch-Tone™ keypad to put in a PIN, but to do that ... you'd have to get to a phone (and even late in the game, a lot of phones still had rotary dials, so not just any phone).

But of course, and this is the part that surprised me enough I remember discussing it in at least one post here, nobody leaves voicemail any more. I mean, you can still do it, but I'm not sure when I last left a voicemail for a person, as opposed to a business or doctor's office.

It took me a while to understand why. If you call someone and it goes to voicemail, surely it's easier to just say a message than to hang up and type out a text. Fair enough, but it's even easier to just type out the text without calling and waiting for an answer or voicemail. The setup for a voice connection is heavier weight than one might expect.

It's also a lot easier for the receiver to glance at a text than to access voicemail and then listen through. After hearing "Why didn't you just text me?" over and over, voicemail starts to look less and less attractive. With smart keyboards and speech-to-text, texting isn't that hard anyway, at least in my experience. And so came the return of telegram style and enough abbreviations, slang and conventions to (arguably) constitute a new dialect.

So the main differences here are that it's harder to unplug and ... text.

I was going to emphasize how utterly disruptive it is to always be connected but ... maybe not. Yes, I'm reachable by phone most of my waking hours, but I don't actually get that many phone calls. In particular, I don't get a lot of cold calls. Most of the time if someone calls me it's an actual person that's either a friend/family member or someone I'd asked to call me. I don't get a lot of spam calls to begin with, and if I do, I can either decline and let it go to voicemail, to check (and delete) at my leisure, or use a screening feature to ask them to leave a voicemail (which they never do).

I think some of this is regulatory, but spammers/scammers don't generally let regulation get in their way too much, so this must mostly be a matter of there being cheaper and more effective ways to spam and scam.

Most of the interruptions I get, by far, are notifications from apps which I chose to get. Or at least, I didn't diligently ask not to get. Many of these are email notifications. I don't get a ton of email, but I do get a steady stream through the day, just almost enough to want to Do Something About It.  I also get notifications for texts, which are generally from people I know, so I tend to look at them right away, and from a couple of news sources, which are pretty selective about only sending out alerts for major news. The main thing that's bugging me right now is the stream of "hey this movie just came out" notifications that I don't recall asking for, but that seems to have tapered off (or I turned them off?).

In other words, being "always on" doesn't seem to require being very "on", and there are a few things I could do to make it less disruptive yet. On the flip side, I can call or text pretty much any time I want, as long as I'm not driving, and even then it's usually not that hard to pull over. If I'm at the grocery store and I want to double-check what a household member wanted, that's easy. If I'm in an accident, I can call 911 (or if I can't, I have bigger problems). And so forth.

It's also easier to meet up, which is nice. I remember arranging to meet friends in Berlin not long after the Wall came down. After a few phone calls (and maybe even letters and postcards?), we arrived at a plan: meet on such-and-such date at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche at high noon. If not everyone was there, come back at 1:00 and so forth, so that whoever was already there would have to sit around waiting. I don't think we set a time to give up waiting, but it was understood that if it got to be too late, whoever was there would just go on and see the city and whoever couldn't make it couldn't make it.

As it turned out, most of us were there at noon and the others showed up at 1:00 and off we went. During the visit, we'd occasionally arrange a rendezvous point to meet up at if we got separated, which may or may not have actually happened. This was pretty normal and it tended to work pretty well, but again, I'm not sure when was the last time I've made a plan like that, because why bother when you can just text or call? It's still a good trick to keep in mind, though, I think.

So staying connected is disruptive, but not really all that disruptive. Being more connected also has some conveniences, but is it really all that much more convenient? 

What did you do before search?

For the purposes of this post, let's assume that search Just Works: you can easily find any particular bit of information you need, assuming it's on the web somewhere (and "the web" basically means "whatever your search engine can find").

Sometimes, you'd end up just not finding something out. But there were options.

If you wanted a phone number or address, you could look someone up in the phone book. Since phone books were physical things, and fairly hefty ones in many cases, you could really only access them locally, though many libraries had phone books for major cities. In other words, there was an element of privacy protection built in, which tended to be enough for most purposes, though people did get unlisted numbers for various reasons.

Adding on to my claim that changes in how phones work have been among the most disruptive, that whole paragraph is from another age. If I want to call a business, their number is on their web page. If I want to call a person, we'll have exchanged phone numbers (likely by text, of course). My phone will remember my contacts, but that's actually not such a big deal. It doesn't take a lot of space to write down names and addresses of people, and you could get a miniature notebook for just such a purpose (I still have one somewhere).

The main convenience is being able to tap on an icon and have the phone place the call without even having to know the number -- there are only a few numbers I have memorized now, but mostly because I use them for supermarket loyalty programs and such, not because I dial them.

But what would one actually search for?

There are two main categories, I think. One is day-to-day information: Where is there a good restaurant that serves X kind of food? When is the DMV open? Does the local hardware store carry left-handed socket wrenches? (No, that's not a thing).

This is largely a matter of advertising (which, for the purposes of this post, at least, is distinct from search).  Businesses have an incentive to let as many people as possible know that they're around, so there's probably a local restaurant guide that will tell you who serves what, and there are probably multiple copies of it in various drawers in the house, or under the couch, because they just seem to keep turning up and, yikes, maybe they can reproduce?

You probably got something in the mail telling you when local government offices like the DMV are open, and they're probably listed in the yellow pages as well (back to phones ... there were actually two kinds of phone books: the white pages had residential listings for anyone with a phone who didn't opt out, and the yellow pages had paid listings for various businesses and similar entities. It's been so long since I've used one that I almost forgot that DMV would be in there).

Unless you lived in a major city, there probably weren't that many restaurants in town anyway, and it didn't take long to get to know them. As to hours, it was a good bet that anything that was open for business would at least be open between 10:00 and 4:00 on a weekday, and anything retail was at least open on Saturday (though maybe not Sunday, depending on where you were).  Again I say "was" and "would", but as far as I can tell, that's still mostly true.

In other words, if you search for "X restaurant near me", you're not asking something that could only be answered, or only be conveniently answered, once search engines came along. You're asking something that used to be reasonably easy to answer and is now somewhat easier, in principle.

As to what's available for sale where, some outlets would put out catalogs (the Sears Catalog is a famous example -- I hope that when you chase that link it says more about the cultural significance of that catalog) and many stores would put out flyers in the local newspaper saying what they had on sale that week.

Or (once more back to phones) you could call the hardware store and ask whether they had left-handed socket wrenches, and most likely someone would actually pick up the phone on the other end and tell you (and try not to giggle too loudly).

Long story short, most of the "Where can I find this in the physical world right now?" questions could be answered pretty easily, because people had an interest in making them easy to answer, just as they do now. The main difference is that there were more people involved. For example, there were more people working at a typical retail store to help customers and also to answer the phone if someone called. And that was kinda nice. I still miss it from time to time.

The other main thing I use search for is research, for example looking up material to put in a blog post. Having so much material online and searchable changes things considerably, but despite what the cartoon might suggest, it wasn't impossible to find things out.

To be sure, this wasn't something most people could do at home, if it wasn't in the dictionary or encyclopedia that were much more commonplace or in some book or magazine that you happened to have on hand, and it helped, a lot, to have a university library or similar institution in your area. If you could get to one of those, though, there were definitely resources:

• There were probably microfilm copies of major newspapers and magazines plus local and regional publications
• Reference books like The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature would tell you what was in those publications
• There would be copies of major scientific journals
• There would be a large reference section full of reference books on a wide variety of subjects
• And, of course, there would be a large collection of fiction, and non-fiction history, science, art, music and many other subjects
• Along with a card catalog to tell you where to find all of the above
• Your local school library would be a miniature of this, so you could practice finding books in the catalog and maybe even reading a microfilm copy of a news article you found in the Reader's Guide.

The main problem, besides not having access if you didn't live near such a library, is that it's harder to keep a collection of physical texts up to date. Even so, the library would have subscriptions to many major publications, and the Reader's Guide published updates biweekly, so you still could get a pretty good idea of the latest developments.

All this depended on your library carrying the type of information you were interested in and the major reference publishers indexing it. These being human endeavors and resources being limited, there was plenty of room for conscious bias, unconscious bias and plain old budgetary constraints to skew the picture.

Today, of course, you can search anything the major search engines index, major news sources update their pages continuously, preprints are up on ArXiv as soon as the authors want them to be, and information is generally available more widely and more quickly than it used to be. I'm going to steer well clear of how the current web-centric view of the world of information may be biased, and why, but I'll certainly acknowledge that it's a worthy topic of discussion.

But then, how many people are in the business of serious research? For us amateurs, how much does it really matter whether I find out about a new development right away, or in a month or a year when it finds its way into the library system, or a friend mails me a photocopy of someone's lecture notes, or whatever else. For the pros, even a good search engine will only get you so far.

Beyond that, as far as I can tell, you still need a good network of sources, whether primary sources or people who can point you to them or pull together, assess and summarize the information from primary sources. It remains to be seen what role LLMs will end up playing in that, particularly in professional-level research.

Search engines make day-to-day questions more convenient to answer, and they make the amateur researcher's job quite a bit easier, but were those all that hard to begin with?

What did you do before streaming?

Bought CDs, bought/rented DVDs or videotapes, watched TV, went out to movies, not to mention quite a few live shows.

Sometimes even talked to people.

What did you do before LLMs?

Dunno ... what did you do? It hasn't been that long!

What changed?

This is one of those posts that started as one thing, trying to make some sort of Larger Point, but ended up as ... something. It started out on the long-running theme of not-so-disruptive technology, then devolved into a technical exploration as I tried to back that point up, and then went a somewhat different direction because of what I actually found when I went researching, before sorta circling back to the general vicinity of the of the original theme and pulling together some threads from some of the first posts on this blog from, oh, a minute or two ago. Rather than try to polish all this up into some sort of coherent essay, I've decided to leave it pretty much as written. Perhaps as some sort of compensation, I've included a lot more links than I usually do.

Looking back I see that in 2024, I've already doubled my output from 2023 (by a score of two posts to one), so maybe I should quit while I'm ahead. But I had an idea for a post, and after re-reading back to July of 2020 (that is, seven posts), I'm pretty sure I haven't explored this particular point before, at least not recently. Or rather, I have, given that the not-so-disruptive technology tag is in second place behind annoyances, but if I've stepped back and surveyed it from a broader point of view, it hasn't been in the last four years.

(I also notice that the link to Intermittent Conjecture is for a four-year-old post, probably because that particular feature is no longer particularly supported, because of course it's not. Grandpa, what's a "blogroll"?)

I considered editing that last bit of snark out, especially since annoyances is already well represented, but I think that it's probably in line with the rest of this post, though maybe in a roundabout way.

It's almost an axiom that newly-developed technology will Change the World. I say "almost" because technically an axiom is a statement that you assume to be true because it's essential to the rest of your logical framework, but you don't have any other way to prove it to be true, so you have to just assume it. I'm thinking of mathematical axioms like "a thing is equal to itself" or, more esoterically, "if you have a collection of sets, you can form a new set by choosing one element from each" (it took quite a bit of work to figure out that you can't prove that from other axioms like "two sets are equal if you can match up their elements one-to-one in both directions").

"New technology changes everything" is a statement that people often assume to be true, and it's essential to at least some people's logical frameworks, but I wouldn't call it an axiom because you can actually look at any given new technology and, I claim, come to a reasonable conclusion as to whether it changed everything. And then, maybe, as a followup question, by how much?

To take a couple of easy, well-known examples, it's not hard to argue that, say agriculture changed everything, or antibiotics changed everything. Except ... depending on what you call "agriculture", you could argue that agriculture was around for thousands of years before cities like Shuruppak or Dholavira arose. On a smaller timescale, the first modern antibiotic was extracted from mold growing on a bacterial culture in 1928, but it wasn't available in useful quantities until the early1940s.

It's not the discovery of a technology that makes the difference. There wasn't even any one event that you could call "the discovery of agriculture." There was an event that could be called "the discovery of (modern) antibiotics (that were known to work by killing microbes)", but that in itself didn't change anybody's life greatly.

The point here that simple statements like "agriculture/antibiotics changed everything" turn a bit mushy after even a little prodding. More accurate versions might be "over the millennia, developments in agriculture have had a significant impact on human population and living patterns" or "the development, mass manufacture and widespread deployment of several types of antibiotics in the latter half of the 1900s had a significant impact on human health outcomes."

Clearly there have been significant changes in how people live, and clearly developments in agriculture and medicine, including the development of antibiotics, have played a significant role in that, but it's not a simple matter of "agriculture happened" or "antibiotics happened" followed by "everything changed". The actual stories are full of false starts, backtracks, accidental discoveries, social upheavals, twists of fate and all sorts of other seemingly extraneous factors. Which is the interesting part.

What got me started on all this was thinking about how the web has changed communication, and in particular telecommunication. Except, as soon as I wrote that, I realized that it's more a matter of the internet changing communication, since I've already argued that it's the web of links that makes the web webby, and I'll just claim here that this webbiness hasn't had a large impact on how we communicate with each other.

We could just as well have Skype and Zoom without the web. For that matter, to a large extent each social media platform is its own web, and not "the" web. But that way lies yet another round of fretting over what exactly am I blogging about here ... For now, let's file communication technology under "the web at large" or something and get on with it.

For most of human existence, the only way to communicate detailed information over a long distance was by people moving around. Travelers would bring stories and knowledge and trade items with them and information would diffuse across large areas, but if that traveler wanted to send a specific message to someone they'd met years ago while traveling someplace far from their current location, well, good luck with that. It may not have been impossible, but it couldn't have been commonplace.

Several thousand years ago, digital communication came along and changed this. With writing came the option of moving a written message with the sender's exact words (there wasn't any single "invention of writing", either, but let's just roll with it). Messages could be sealed so that their contents couldn't be easily changed, signed so that you could tell who they came from, and even encrypted so that only the intended reader could read them, or at least that was the idea.

Digital telegraph systems, also dating back thousands of years, could transmit text from point A to point B without even needing a person having to carry it. The Greek phryctoria, a system of towers on mountaintops with torches, are a good example but not the only one.

Two key measures of telecommunication are bandwidth, which is how many bits can be transmitted in a given amount of time, and latency, which is how long it takes to transmit any particular bit from sender to receiver. As usual, the actual definitions are more subtle, particularly for bandwidth, but these will do here. If you're feeling technical, feel free to read bandwidth as bitrate.

For example, if it takes three seconds to switch the torches in a telegraph tower around to show a new letter, and there are 24 possible letters, then the bandwidth is about 4.6/3 bits per second, or about 1.5bps. The latency from one tower to the next, around 30km away, is negligible (about 0.1 milliseconds).

If the message is supposed to be relayed to the next tower in a series of towers, it will take some amount of time for someone to read the arrangement of torches in the sending tower and put the same torches up so the next tower can see them.  Let's say there are two people in the tower, one reading and one putting up torches, and it takes an extra second for the reader to read and announce the next letter, on top of three seconds to arrange the torches. Latency is then four seconds per tower.  That is, if the first tower is sending a message and the second is relaying it to the third, the third tower is getting the message four seconds after it is sent. A fourth tower would be eight seconds behind, and so forth.

Suppose I want to send a message to someone ten towers away. Latency is still pretty good, relatively speaking. The last tower will be 36 seconds behind the sender (nine relays for ten towers). If that receiver sends a reply, I can get it just over a minute after sending my message (in more technical terms, round-trip latency is on the order of a minute). While this is glacial by today's standards, it's outstanding in comparison to a multi-day journey to get from where I am to where the receiver is, and I don't have to worry about someone waylaying my messenger along the way (or my messenger deciding they have better things to do with their time).

Bandwidth, though, is not so great. If I'm sending a short message like "Prepare for attack from the north," that's not a problem. Transmitting that message will take a couple of minutes and my receiver will have the whole thing half a minute after I finish sending it. But suppose I'm sending a trade agreement proposal that amounts to 12,000 bits -- still tiny by today's standards. That will take a couple of hours, which is still doable, though not a lot of fun for anyone involved.

But the people on the other end will want to respond with their own counterproposals, and so on. Pretty soon we're into days, and spare a thought for the twenty people up in the towers shuffling torches around and looking out for torches at other towers through the night  (I'm going to go out on a limb and say this system works better at night).

Probably better to send a trusted emissary with the text of my proposal and maybe some other written instructions. And while they're at it, they could carry messages from other people in my area to people in the receiver's area, or anywhere along the way, and we have ourselves the beginnings of a postal system.  The latency of a postal system is measured in days, but the bandwidth is essentially limited only by how fast people can actually write and read and how many people are sending and receiving messages -- you can fit a lot of sheets of paper onto a horsecart. Not to mention that you can also send drawings and diagrams easily on a sheet of paper.

This may seem like a lot of speculative detail about ancient systems of communication, and it probably is, but it covers the bulk of human history (the written-down part, as opposed to prehistory, which is most of human existence). From ancient times until the late 1800s, long-distance communication was mainly a matter of moving physical texts around, with limited use of alternatives that were much faster (in latency) but also much, much slower (in bandwidth), and quite a bit more expensive. This includes the era of the modern optical telegraph (late 1700s) and electrical telegraph (mid 1800s).

What happens next is interesting. I originally wrote "then came along the telephone," with the idea that it was a major leap to have the bandwidth to carry voice instead of the dots and dashes of morse code. Fortunately, I did a little double-checking and discovered that

• The bandwidth of a telegraph was not that low. A punched-tape system around the time of the telephone's invention could transmit upwards of 400 words per minute. At roughly 12 bits per word, that comes out to about 80 bits per second. That's nothing by modern standards, but it's about 50 times my guess for the phryctoria. Some of that is because Morse code encodes text more efficiently than torches, but most of it is due to the switch to electromagnetic transmission (um, light from torches is also electromagnetic ...).
• The bandwidth of human speech is not that high. In this old post I cited a world record of 10 words per second, or about 120 bits per second, but normal speech is much slower.

In other words, a telephone and a high-speed telegraph are transmitting words at about the same rate, though the telephone has the advantage of carrying tone of voice and not requiring someone to transcribe words onto a paper tape. I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising since both the telephone and telegraph are using the same underlying transmission medium of electromagnetic waves traveling along copper wires or, a little later, over the air.

The same technology could also transmit images. The first facsimile machine (perhaps you've heard of "faxes"?) was developed around the same time as the telephone. Later, in the 1920s, a number of inventors on a number of continents (including Leon Theremin, better known for the musical instrument) developed various systems for transmitting moving images. Early television station WRGB ("RGB" can't be a coincidence, can it?) transmitted 40-line images at 20 frames per second. Let's guess that a 40-line image equates to 1600 8-bit pixels. That comes out to about 260 thousand bits per second (260kbps).

This is already a remarkable increase in bandwidth*, from a hundred or so bits per second in the mid 1800s to hundreds of thousands in the early 1900s. By the dawn of the internet, let's say 1974 -- fifty years ago -- when the proposal for TCP was published, a leased telephone line could carry around 50kbps (56kbps as I recall and Wikipedia seems to confirm). That was the basic unit -- it was entirely possible, and typical, to lease more than one. By the mid 1980s, NFSNET was using 1.5Mbps T1 lines. Later came T3 lines at 45Mbs (so a T3 is worth 30 T1, go figure), and today we're talking gigabits or more. 

This is all a matter of how bandwidth is sold. The actual transmission cables are much heftier. Fiber optic cables can carry petabits per second (Pbs). A peta is a million gigas, that is, a petabit per second is a quadrillion bits per second, or about 125 thousand bits per second for every person on the planet. Commercially available cables are somewhat smaller, but not much, measured in hundreds of terabits, that is, hundreds of trillions of bits per second.

There are still some specialized applications that can give that much bandwidth a workout, but in human terms the amount of bandwidth available is absolutely ridiculous ("available to whom?" is a fair question). Which brings me back to one of the earliest themes on this blog: limits on human bandwidth. That is, how much information can any individual person deal with? I discussed several aspects of this in this post about, oh, seventeen years ago.

In terms of bits per second, our highest use of bandwidth is probably the visual system,.which processes somewhere around a gigabit per second considered as raw pixels, but there's a lot of redundancy in there. A good MP4-compressed video stream, which includes audio, is more like 10Mbps. Since a format like MP4 is tuned to provide only the information we actually process, it's probably a better measure of how much data the visual system is actually processing.

There's a lot we don't know about our other sensory input -- touch, smell, proprioception and whatever else, but it's clearly operating at a much lower bandwidth (for example, a walking robot does not need a fiber optic cable to tell the CPU how far its knee is bent or how much pressure its foot is exerting).

In other words, there are many, many ordinary houses with much more than enough bandwidth to saturate the sensory input of all the humans in them, if said sensory inputs could all be magically connected to a stream of bits. In practice, it means that there's enough bandwidth for everyone in the place to spend all their time watching video.

But -- and maybe this really is leading to some sort of point about technology changing everything -- that's been true for quite a while, at least since the advent of 24-hour cable TV, which is to say, also about 50 years ago, which I've just called the dawn of the internet. I don't think this is at all a coincidence. Let's try to boil all the stuff about bandwidth down to a few bullet points:

• For most of human existence, long-distance, low-latency bandwidth was zero -- there was no way to get a specific message across a long distance quickly. You could interact with some directly at short distance with high bandwidth and low latency, but that was about it.
• For most of human history, long-distance, low-latency bandwidth has been very low. In some times and places it was possible to quickly transmit a short message over a long distance, but even then, latency was measured in minutes and bandwidth in single-digit bits per second.
• Starting in the 1800s, electromagnetic transmission led to huge increases in low-latency, long-distance bandwidth, from single-digit bits per second to current rates, which are enough to enable video calls between any two internet-connected points.
• In the mid to late 1900s, bandwidth was high enough and cheap enough to enable two innovations:
• Cable TV carrying over a hundred channels 24/7
• Wide-area digital networking

Of the two, digital networking was by far the slower. Early networks mainly transmitted text, whether in human or computer languages. If you had a terminal at home, you could typically connect to your local network at speeds of 110 to 2400 baud (in general a different unit from bits per second, but in this case the same), and hope that you'd remembered to turn off call waiting on your landline. Then, after a long day of hacking, you could flip on the TV and watch at something like a megabit (resolution was lower in those days).

Even backbone connections were very slow by today's standards. This doesn't seem like a technical limitation, since ordinary coax cable could handle megabits, but more a matter of there not being that much digital information to send. If I wanted to talk to a colleague on the other side of the country, I wouldn't have tried to set up a call over the internet at the time. I would just pick up the phone.

The digital convergence that happened gradually over the next couple of decades consisted largely of building up the internet backbone, which was based on telephone and cable technology (mostly telephone, I believe), to the point where it could carry digital information at a rate comparable to the analog technologies that had been around since the beginning of the whole exercise.

Technically, this was revolutionary. For most intents and purposes, anything that was analog in the mid 1900s, particularly television, telephone and radio, is now carried digitally on the same network infrastructure that you can use to send purely digital information like ... text and emails? Source code?

This is a kind of interesting way to look at it. Hiding inside the massive digital network that delivers sound and video to us is a tiny replica of the original internet, albeit expanded from a few thousand researchers to a significant slice of the world's population. Billions are bigger than thousands, of course, a million times bigger, in fact, but overall digital bandwidth has increased by much more than a factor of a million.

(The early internet wasn't just used for email and source or object code. It was also used to transmit scientific data. Some datasets can be quite large, particularly in astronomy and particle physics, large enough to saturate even the modern backbone. But in such cases data is generally transmitted by putting it on physical media, which is then shipped. The postal service still wins on bandwidth. And yes, I am proudly using both data and media as mass nouns here.)

I think what I'm trying to sort out here is that the digital convergence can be looked at two ways. The original vision was to bring the intelligence of the internet to existing audio and video media. A TV cable brings a fixed set of channels into your house and very little back out. An analog phone circuit delivers voice traffic from point A to point B. A digital network can carry information from any number of senders to any number of receivers and do any kind of processing along the way.

On the other hand, technically, the digital convergence was a shift from sending analog data over analog lines (or over the air) to sending the same data over the same lines, or at least the same types of lines plus the cell network (also fundamentally analog), but encoded digitally, then re-encoded into analog signals and likewise decoded and re-decoded on the other end.

Why do that?

The wilder speculations of the 1990s haven't really panned out. A phone call is still a phone call. True, most of the time it's easier just to text, but texting needs much less bandwidth than calling. It certainly does not require a huge buildout of digital bandwidth. All the texts you send in a year would probably amount to a few seconds of audio.

TV shows are still TV shows and movies are still movies. Exciting new possibilities like interactive choose-your-own-adventure TV are an occasional novelty. Live streams allow viewers to interact with the presenter/performer, but so did call-in TV shows.

The difference is control. Outside the occasional news program or sporting event, I'm not sure I can remember the last time I watched something at the same time it was broadcast, if it was ever broadcast at all. I haven't bought an album in years, even in digital form. I stream what I want to watch or listen to, and I'm hardly a bleeding-edge early adopter. If I want to participate in a livestream, I can choose that. More importantly, if a creator wants to put on a live stream, they can easily do that. If I want to set up a video call with some people at work (or not at work), that's easy, too.

Some of these might be possible with the old technology. I could imagine a high-bandwidth phone service that would allow you to call a special number to connect to a video server and pick out what to watch on your video-enabled phone terminal, but putting everything on a digital network that handles data as bits regardless of its content or where it's going has made all of this much easier.

This is all sliced finely enough that individual people can decide which individual people to communicate with, from friend group to celebrity influencers to major organizations and whatever else. I'm personally not sure how much the behavior that this has enabled is new and how much is stuff that people were doing anyway. I explored that theme fairly early on, here, here and here for example, but I don't really do much with social media, even if you count blogging and the occasional visit to LinkedIn.

I think "Digital communication has changed everything" is true in about the same way as "Agriculture has changed everything". On the one hand, it has to be true. Being able to communicate instantly with any of billions of people has to be different from only being able to communicate instantly with the people around you. Being able to transmit high-resolution video across the world with negligible delay has to be different from being able to send a letter across a continent in days or weeks.

Being able to stream from a wide collection of audio and video is certainly different from having to buy or borrow books, records/CDs and videotapes/DVDs, and since that shift has happened well within living memory, it can certainly seem like things are changing rapidly.

But on the other hand, digital technology, including digital telecommunication, has been around for thousands of years. Analog telecommunication has been around for about a century and a half. What we might call the digital revolution is a change in how we transmit and access information, primarily audio and video, that had previously been analog, sitting on top of a huge increase in overall telecommunication bandwidth that began happening over a hundred years ago.

Just as there is no particular beginning of agriculture, there is no particular beginning of digital communication. Even if you could pinpoint the first time a person deliberately planted a seed with the intention of harvesting food later, or the first time a person deliberately made marks to represent words with the intention of someone else reading them later, it wouldn't tell you much. What matters isn't the particular starting point, but the long history of development and use over the millennia.

So far, advances in communication have been about people communicating with people. Machines do communicate with other machines without direct human involvement, but this is mainly in service of people communicating with people. This may change, but that's for another blog.

As far as people communicating with people, the limiting factor is mainly the people themselves. There are only so many conversations one can have and so many people to have them with. The whole point of a video conversation is to make the call as much like talking face to face as possible, that is, to accommodate our limitations in how we communicate. There are now ways of broadcasting a message from one person to millions of people, or even a billion, but even if one person can broadcast a message to a billion people instantly, those billion people will make sense of it in terms of their own lives, their own views and their own desires. 

The how of communicating with other people has changed greatly over the millennia, and particularly greatly in recent decades. This in turn has significantly affected whom we can communicate with. But what we talk about, even if we're talking about how quickly things appear to be changing, doesn't really seem to have changed much at all.

One of the earliest themes of this blog was trying to understand what effect the web and the internet would have on how we talk to each other. My instinct has been generally been to push back against "It's all different now" narratives, and I think my instinct has largely been borne out (but then, I would think that, wouldn't I?).

And yet, I can't believe that nothing has changed. A lot has changed. Some part of me wishes that, after nearly two decades, I could arrive at some sort of grand summing-up of What The Web Is About and what effect it's had, but after all this time, I'm not sure I have much beyond my original take: "It's not nothing, but I'm not sure what it is, except whatever it is doesn't line up that well with the hype."