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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused by this piece.

A lot of it echoes the book "The Victorian Internet" that digs up historical nuggets from the early days of the telegraph that sound like the birth of the internet. (e.g. people running away and marrying people they fell in love with even though they'd only ever had text/Morse communication with them)

But it seems that they're interpreting "radio" in the modern sense, and so not counting TV, mobile phones, Bluetooth, WiFi, wireless charging etc. which the originators may not have guessed at, but wouldn't have abitrarily placed a boundary on their hopes based on categories not yet invented. Radio, in that bigger sense is a very vital thing, even if it's "normal" to most of us.

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Author of this blog post here, thank you for mentioning The Victorian Internet. I’d read that years back, deeply enjoyed it, but didn’t think to reference it in this piece.

I’d read Empire of the Air and Hello, everybody! along with a number of older radio-focused journals (thanks, Internet Archive) for this piece, while researching the history of radio generally and broadcasting more broadly. And it struck me how many things were similar to more recent hype cycles in technologies, with lofty ideas, eccentric inventors, early military usage of tech that later would be seen as something to level the playing field, a focus on “speed and feeds” that then faded away as everything became good enough, and so on.

You’ve got a great point now at how much radio permeates daily life—the words in the article themselves were sent over bluetooth and wifi. I was focusing on radio broadcasting and the equipment and inventions that enabled that. But in a broader sense, it could almost be that this time period was the peak of expectations in the hype cycle, and then now we’re in the plateau of productivity. That may have been the better point to make.

You may also be familiar with the 1879 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes" - perhaps filling a similar fictional niche in its time that "You've Got Mail" did nearly 120 years later.

I think I disagree about the nature of the "hype cycle." Too often it's portrayed as a negative thing, or some kind of grift pulled on the hapless public. More optimistically it's like a period of brainstorming. Not all the ideas work out, not all the promises are delivered on (world peace is a big ask), but eventually the good ideas survive and come to fruition.

It's easy to be cynical about new technology in a world of nonstop bullshit marketing and incremental improvements sold as the Next Big Thing. But in the long run I don't feel like I've ever been truly let down by a "hyped" technology. Even Segway, the textbook example of reality distortion, eventually produced descendant technologies that found their way into a number of widely-used PEVs.

This was my thought as well. Radar, microwave communication, satellites... all use radio technology. It's so pervasive it's almost invisible.

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