Better to read the original article: http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/07/wired_... and not the Boing Boing summary.

Yes, especially as you would miss some of the fascinating comments on the original. One linked to a collection of a collection of similar literature from 1877: http://archive.org/details/lightningflashes00john

Another described old men tapping out jokes to one another in morse with their pipes.

This story sounds pretty believable after reading Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet, especially Chapter 8, "Love over the Wires".

That's one of my favorite books (and finally available in a Kindle edition!). Don't take my word for it, read a few of the reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-Internet/dp/B002STNBKM/

More stories of high tech in the 1800's in Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Seconding The Victorian Internet. It's a fairly easy and delightful read, and is about an afternoon's worth of chugging.

I had to read The Victorian Internet for a class and it reminded me a lot of IRC. Definitely recommend.

Another prescient scifi story is E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops", written in 1909.[1][2]

[1] - http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

Yes. This is an amazing and hair-raising short story, written over a century ago and one that predicted the advent of digital lives so eerily.

This.

Pretty much sounds like the plot to You've Got Mail.

Sweet! I'll probably like it, then. ;) It's amazing how many movies and stories are similar on some level, yet have completely different aspects that make them both enjoyable and interesting (e.g., The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor). If I never saw another romantic comedy again because it was too similar to the Princess Bride (etc), or never looked at a new programming language "because it's pretty much like lisp/python/etc" again, I'd miss out on a lot of good stuff.

I found this quite interesting as when I was first a ham radio operator, I had many friends that I had not met. In high school, I had a girlfriend who was a Ham who I had not met in person. There is a very famous story about an RCA telegraph operator (very first female employee of RCA) who met someone on the air, and ended up marrying him. He was also a ham radio operator.

The things that many internet users presume are new have actually been going on for some time.

The tagline is similarly modern:

“The old, old story,”—in a new, new way.

Somewhat relevant xkcd, the more things change the more they stay the same: http://xkcd.com/1227/

"The wide blue sky was shredded by the dark criss-crossing telegraph lines..."