Discussion Main / PurelyAestheticEra

I pulled this:

• On Discworld we've seen Moving Pictures, rock and roll, action figures of Captain Carrot, and a clacks system that is suspiciously similar to the Internet.
  • Leading to the bizarre occurrence of the Internet being invented before newspapers. And before a working postal system. Things are strange on the Disc.
    • In Ankh-Morpork's defense, it'd had a working postal system a generation ago; Going Postal was about how it was brought back into service after decades of neglect.
    • There was also a postal system of sorts operating anyway. There are numerous references to getting the days postal delivery distributed to its' intended recipients at Unseen University and the Opera House, and one of Shawn Ogg's numerous jobs in Lancre is dealing with the mail (a lot of which comes from or goes too Ankh-Morpork). The traffic between seems to be carried on the old Mail Coaches, which never stopped running (since passenger traffic was still a viable operation). Sam Vimes also reflects that the money being sent to the dwarf towns in the Hub Mountains by Dwarfs in the city mostly comes back to pay for the goods ordered from the best Dwarf craftsman, who mostly live in Ankh-Morpork now.
  • Leonard of Quirm is this trope all by himself, alternately inventing da Vinci-style period pieces and such anomalies as post-it notes, espresso, automatic rifles, dragon-powered spacecraft, and Scrabble. He has also considered the possibilities of compressed spheres of uranium.

Because the Discworld isn't Roundworld, therefore its history isn't a purely aestheric version of Roundworld history. It's Discworld history, and since Terry doesn't believe in Tech Levels, it can happen in any order he wants.

Also, the semaphore network is "suspiciously similar" to the internet in much the same way as the telegraph was.