Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001)

Re:Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001) by jhbadger on Monday April 09, 2018 @10:11AM (#16793068)

Reminds me of stories of how, when the telegraph was common, people purchased code books in order to compress their messages. Not for security, necessarily, as many of the codes were public knowledge, but in order to save money as one code word could replace a whole common sentence. The telegraph companies eventually banned codes for that reason.

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Re:Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001) by dspillett on Monday April 09, 2018 @10:54AM (#16793437)

> The telegraph companies eventually banned codes for that reason.

And as with today's spin machines, some claimed that the ban was to help their customers by reducing the likelihood of code related errors (mainly the effect of transcription errors when writing or reading back the telegram) causing significant communication errors. The past is not as alien a country as we sometimes think!

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Re:Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001) by teekert on Monday April 09, 2018 @10:28AM (#16793222)

And just as with SMS the greediness of the telegraph companies probably only sped up development of alternatives.

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Re:Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001) by ada1981 on Monday April 09, 2018 @11:23AM (#16793761)

The equivalent of LOL or LMAO.

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