alt Hacker NewsOne of my favorite stories about Morse Code:
Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) [0] went deaf later in life. He would go to meetings with his assistant and when some asked Bell a question, he would pause, say let me think about that, pause again, and then give a response
What was actually happening was that his assistant was using Morse Code + Phillips Code [1] to tap out the question on Bell's leg under the table. Apparently, no one ever figured out they were doing this.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend the Victorian Internet [2] which is about the telegraph and how it was discovered, adopted and then became ubiquitous. I first read it in the late 2000s and assumed it had been written a year or two earlier but was surprised to learn it had been written in the 1990s given how prescient it was. e.g. it mentioned how local newspapers shut down because who cares about local news when you have global news?
There is also a mention of how being a telegraph operator was VERY similar to be a SWE in the late 2010s in that it paid well, job mobility was very high and it was a hard skill to learn. Edison actually got his seed capital by being a telegraph operator who pivoted into repairing telegraph equipment. There are also many comparisons that can be made to AI and how it's being adopted in the economy and affecting SWEs.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Code
2 - https://amzn.to/4wx75KY (Victorian Internet)
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Speaking of Victorian... I was in a fire department museum in Boston this past weekend and learned that the fire boxes around the city with the levers that one would pull in case of fire would communicate their location to one of the city's central fire control rooms via a spring wound Morse code transmitter inside the box. When the firemen arrived they'd also communicate with the control rooms with a Morse code keyer and audio device inside the fire box. So firemen, or at least some of them on each brigade, had to know Morse code to get the job.
The Art and Skill of Radio Telegraphy by N0HFF[1][2] is also an interesting read, and goes into a lot of the history. I recommend it if you want to know more on the subject.
[1]: https://www.qsl.net/w9aml/documents/TheArtandSkillofRadioTel...
[2]: You can also find it elsewhere; the title is distinctive enough.
I second the Victorian Internet recommendation!
The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.
The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology
I just this moment realized I need a fidget toy that’s a CW key I can use for taking notes in meetings, just short things like “ask boss about thing he mentioned”.
Amazon URL contains "tag=aphackernews-20" query param after following the shortened URL... does Hacker News rewrite Amazon links to include a Hacker News referral tag?! Here's the URL without all the extraneous stuff added (though maybe it will just get auto-rewritten, time to find out I guess) https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
No, now I understand what "aphackernews" is, it's "ap" short for "alexpotato".