7.07.2011

Kids these days

How the Titanic disaster pushed Uncle Sam to "rule the air"

"Some amateurs deliberately sent false or obscene message [sic], especially to the navy," Douglas notes. "The temptation to indulge in such practical joking was enhanced by the fact that detection was virtually impossible. Amateurs would pretend to be military officials or commercial operators, and they dispatched ships on all sorts of fabricated missions."

The navy didn't think any of this was funny, of course.

Well, OK, those days. This is the first decade of the last century we're talking about here, and the technology was not TCP/IP but just plain old radio. Not txt, Morse Code. But that doesn't make it sound any less like fun.

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