Not everyone’s ready for Love on the Net:
George McCutcheon was in the business of selling periodicals, and he wanted to be able to take orders on the net. He wasn’t very into technology, so he asked his teenage daughter, Maggie, to handle that part of the business. Maggie soon had the connection working, but also used it to flirt with many men she met on-line. She invited one of them, Frank, to visit her in the real world. Her father found out, and was furious…furious to the point that he threatened to kill her if she saw Frank again. Maggie had her father arrested and charged with threatening behavior.Yawn, you say…why is this newsworthy? Things like this probably happen all the time.
The above incident, though, happened in the 1880s, and was written up in the 1886 edition of Electrical World. The “net” referred to above was the telegraph network.
That story came from Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet.