I love the Spark Museum, but this particular page might be of interest to people interested in the bleeding edge of 19th century communications technology. The Hughes Telegraph had a keyboard and could send and receive actual text.
The images of the needle readers, etc, might be of some interest, also, to builders.
http://www.sparkmuseum.com/TELEGRAPH.HTM
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LOVE this. It makes you wonder what the world would be like if the automated telegraph had morphed right into the net – routers, packet protocols, message storage, pattern compression … analytical engines at the ends of cables or managing the nodes… I sometimes explain the internet as a scaled-up telegraph to get the basic concepts across.
its not impossible to imagine various analytical engines being attached, sharing code and output through stock ticker mechanisms and morse senders, even more slowly, across undersea cables.
Here is one person’s interpretation of a steampunk internet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPBpXlZumNg
Seems like this is a good place to share this flowchart on how to explain the Internet to Dickensian street urchins:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1697711/explain-the-internet-19th-century-british-street-urchin-doogie-horner
;)
Heh!