Re:Email Lessons from Napoleon
by dredmorbius on Monday November 30, 2020 @05:39PM
(#25259957)
Fair point on pigeons. Mentioned as an example in Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls, in active use between Mountain View and Santa Cruz as late as the 1970s. Reading the Wikipedia article, I'd not realised use dated back to pharonic Egypt!
Still useful only between (or at least to) given established points, and adding new nodes took time.
Consider that a critical advantage of the Germans over the French in Fall Rot, June, 1940, was radio-equipped tanks, enabling direct unit-to-unit comms and improvisation on the battlefield.
Still, it's sobering that the Royal Road represented the plateau in long-distance information transmission for very nearly 2500 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Road
I'll also highlight the key phrase tended to be in my original comment.
Well, for the army. Naval semaphore (flags) could pass information across serious distance. Scout ships would often be over the horizon from flagships, their messages relayed back in minutes. The speed of pre-electric mechanical communication is underappreciated today.
Also, carrier pigeons were faster than horses.
"Messenger pigeons were used as early as 1150 in Baghdad[8] and also later by Genghis Khan. By 1167 a regular service between Baghdad and Syria had been established by Sultan Nur ad-Din.[9]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon