A Two-Miles-per-Hour World: the speed that news traveled to Venice, 1500 to 1765 | Hacker News Reader

A Two-Miles-per-Hour World: the speed that news traveled to Venice, 1500 to 1765

pages.uoregon.edu

37 pointsbenbreen13 comments

I should add that this submission was inspired by the discussion yesterday about the 1914 map of travel times from London:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10647586

Fernand Braudel is one of those people who specialists in a field all recognize as a revolutionary figure but the general public doesn't seem to know about. In my view he's probably the most influential historian of the 20th century, not least because of his innovative way of thinking about data visualization and mapping. His work ended up leading to some very early experiments with what we now call digital humanities among his various acolytes in France and the US, back in the punched card era. Interesting guy.

Edit: forgot to mention a famous bit of lore about the book these maps came from - he actually wrote the original draft of it when he was a member of the French Resistance imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp.

The degradation of service from some areas (particularly France and the Iberian peninsula) between the second and third maps is interesting. I guess that it was a consequence of deteriorating political relations (the War of the Austrian Succession, perhaps?)

An interesting point: but the distances over land don't vary that much. I suspect it is insecurity of sea travel between Italy and Spain, but from what? Anglo-French conflict, North African corsairs?

A 1TB drive going 2 miles in one hour would still be a decent transfer rate.

That's a riff on Tanenbaum:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

Depends on distance, other side of the planet is less than 0.2Mbps.

I was thinking that everyone every 2 miles would send a drive at the same time.

All to me? Can they use 8TB drives instead?

One of the last interviews I saw by Jim Gray mentioned shipping around astronomical data sets in big boxes of hard drives. At that time, they were more likely in the 10GB range than 1TB.

As recently at 2000, major astronomical surveys (SDSS, York et al. 2000) would ship harddrives daily "via express courier" from the scopes to the processing computers.

That's the most recent I can think of. Although some surveys (2MASS) still offer data delivery "on a set of DVDs" if you can't handle FTP.

But the ping is terrible.

Over what distance?

Trade off between (physical space = delivery cost, ping) and bandwidth. A suit case can easily fit 20 1TB drives. A 20 hour journey from Sydney to London, would mean a transfer rate of 1TB per hour, or 2000+ megabits per second, or 300x faster than the internet in my own home. Even carrying only 1 terabyte over 20 hours is a decent 111 megabits/second.

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