
Wired Love: a novel from 1880 that could have been written last week  - wglb
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/07/wired_love_a_ta.php
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jgrahamc
Better to read the original article:
[http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/07/wired_...](http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/07/wired_love_a_ta.php)
and not the Boing Boing summary.

~~~
emhart
Yes, especially as you would miss some of the fascinating comments on the
original. One linked to a collection of a collection of similar literature
from 1877:
[http://archive.org/details/lightningflashes00john](http://archive.org/details/lightningflashes00john)

Another described old men tapping out jokes to one another in morse with their
pipes.

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Stratoscope
This story sounds pretty believable after reading Tom Standage's _The
Victorian Internet_ , especially Chapter 8, "Love over the Wires".

That's one of my favorite books (and finally available in a Kindle edition!).
Don't take my word for it, read a few of the reviews:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-
Internet/dp/B002STNBKM/](http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-
Internet/dp/B002STNBKM/)

More stories of high tech in the 1800's in Neal Stephenson's _Mother Earth
Mother Board_ :

[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html)

~~~
angersock
Seconding _The Victorian Internet_. It's a fairly easy and delightful read,
and is about an afternoon's worth of chugging.

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gnosis
Another prescient scifi story is E. M. Forster's _" The Machine Stops"_,
written in 1909.[1][2]

[1] -
[http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops)

~~~
vert2
Yes. This is an amazing and hair-raising short story, written over a century
ago and one that predicted the advent of digital lives so eerily.

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jere
Pretty much sounds like the plot to _You 've Got Mail._

~~~
gknoy
Sweet! I'll probably like it, then. ;) It's amazing how many movies and
stories are similar on some level, yet have completely different aspects that
make them both enjoyable and interesting (e.g., The Matrix and The Thirteenth
Floor). If I never saw another romantic comedy again because it was too
similar to the Princess Bride (etc), or never looked at a new programming
language "because it's pretty much like lisp/python/etc" again, I'd miss out
on a lot of good stuff.

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wglb
I found this quite interesting as when I was first a ham radio operator, I had
many friends that I had not met. In high school, I had a girlfriend who was a
Ham who I had not met in person. There is a very famous story about an RCA
telegraph operator (very first female employee of RCA) who met someone on the
air, and ended up marrying him. He was also a ham radio operator.

The things that many internet users presume are new have actually been going
on for some time.

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applecore
The tagline is similarly modern:

 _“The old, old story,”—in a new, new way._

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thret
Somewhat relevant xkcd, the more things change the more they stay the same:
[http://xkcd.com/1227/](http://xkcd.com/1227/)

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mikecane
"The wide blue sky was shredded by the dark criss-crossing telegraph lines..."

