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:
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.