It  has been time since the letters were only to sent  by post office and the distances between towns, cities, nations and continents seemed infinitely large. Everyone  waited for a reply from the friends, acquaintances, family members which were displaced temporarily or permanently abroad or in italian cities far from the birthplace. People seemed to get lost in the space and time, sometimes without having an actual response from the recipients of the message. Antonio Meucci was the first man to overcome these barriers by the invention of the telephone which was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. He has made the first innovation in the field of communication systems when there wasn’t about ICT, but only the electromechanical communication technologies. After 138 years since that historical event, the actual scenario has changed, there were many scientific discoveries: in the 1909 Guglielmo Marconi, another important Italian scientist, was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics for the telegraph discovery without wires. He reached the historical maximum distances of communication and he contributed to the birth of British television BBC by means of his telecommunications equipment as well. Only in 1970 we began to talk about “information processing technology”, that is the set of the information technologies and telecommunications which support the transfer of the information (informatics and telecommunication together). The first elaboration systems communicated in a limited way only each other and they filled huge rooms, but with the advent of computers and microprocessors, it was possible to integrate the communication network and the small elaboration systems. Today, sending a message or communicating over long distances, it is no longer a mirage but a reality. We are in the era of digital wireless telecommunications networks, where messages are sent traveling in the form of “packets of binary data,” in compliance to some standardized protocols from the authorities as ITU-T, ETSI.

Antonio Meucci’s phone alias Bell

The communication systems of the 21st century