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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

My favourite idea is the internet. The romans could have done it with flags / torches and towers. Don't tell me it wouldn't pay for itself. Sending data over long distances at that type of speed would have paid for itself multiple times over, even if it were one tiny fraction of the bandwidth we have today.

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Going Postal by Terry Pratchett is a story involving a competition between a traditional post office and a light-based telegraph system called "clacks." You might enjoy the book and/or television adaptation.

After his death a few years ago, an idea from the book was actually implemented on the internet and is the reason you see "GNU Terry Pratchett" around.[0][1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terr...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/2yt9j6/gnu_terry...

Systems like this existed:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph

but were far too expensive to be used by average citizens like the modern Internet.

The Romans themselves had them too: Hadrian's Wall on the border of Roman Britain and Scotland was one place to have a flag-based signalling system which allowed messages to be transmitted within minutes across the entire length of one of the empire's shorter borders.

Given the bandwidth limitations when you're only able to transmit a restricted charset and take at least ten seconds to transmit each character and receive acknowledgement, it's hardly surprising that such systems were used to send a limited number of messages of military value rather than as a generalised communication tech, never mind an information retrieval tech.

The French did it. Check out the wikipedia page on the "semephore telegraph"

It was used for military communication between front lines and Paris. It was also famously used for an early securities fraud scheme https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/rewind/the-crooked-t...

they tried some ideas https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-technology/hydraulic...

I don't think the benefits would be that obvious.

- unknown unknown, to them high bandwidth comms were not really a thing

- technical challenges

- rapid ROI opportunities ?

- frequency of communications and long distances ?

- benefits over simple fire / mirror systems ?

High-bandwidth comms would be 'sending for a book/scroll/papyrus/tablets'. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a cart loaded with papyri!

I guess movable type increased effective bandwidth a lot.

True, although this just gives me one great benefit of 'immaterial' signals.. less opportunity for the messenger to be killed on the way to wherever.

This would also put them into the modern variant of man-in-the-middle attack (which kinda existed in the renaissance, France had a case of remote insider trading for instance)

There's something like this in the movie Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg

I wonder if this method of communication was EVER used by any civilization.

It's been described throughout history, so quite certainly.

Ohhhh, that's true!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communica...

It's in another cool fantasy movie, with signal towers, I can't find it now despite frantic Google (results terrible). Was very cool, wish I could remember the name.

This is an important plot point in the book the excellent Sci Fi novel The Three Body Problem.

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