May 29, 2017
If
you blame Twitter for putting lots of useless trivia into the world (I don’t.
Before there was Twitter, there was Yahoo!), think again.
According
to an article the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, telegraph operators way back in the 1800s
could pretty much do the same thing, using Morse code. They had their own
shorthand for talking to each other, just like we have for texting and Twitter—they
would type “GM” for “Good Morning”, “SFD” for “Stop for dinner”, etc.
When
a message was transmitted, everybody along the line could hear it, and could
join in the conversation—like a chat room. Operators played chess and checkers
using Morse code, and often became long-distance friends, without ever meeting.
And the 1891 issue of Atlantic Monthly
griped about the trivialities being shared and inflicted upon society.
Who
knew?
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