Wealthy people <i>could</i> have a telegraph line installed, and did.  Ulysses S. Grant got news of his election as president in Galena, IL, (along the Mississippi River, near the Iowa-Wisconsin state line) at the house of a local businessman with a private telegraph service.<p>More generally, though, &quot;email&quot; was called &quot;mail&quot;.  In cities, there were often two, and sometimes three mail deliveries daily.  It would be possible to carry on a round-trip correspondence over the course of a day.<p>The precursor of online shopping was called &quot;catalog stores&quot; -- Sears, Roebuck &amp; Co. was the canonical example.  I just caught an item over Ansible last week that Sears had discontinued its catalog in 1993, the year before Amazon started.<p>Robert Gordon, economist at Northwestern University, has just published a book on technology and growth, <i>The Rise and Fall of American Growth</i>.  In it he notes that the typical urban home of 1920 was connected to five &quot;networks&quot;:  water, sewer, gas, electricity, and phone.  I&#x27;d add postal mail and the highway, railroad, canal, and shipping networks as well, though those had a &quot;last mile&quot; component of individual delivery.  Still, this largely offered similar capabilities to today&#x27;s Internet.<p>Email was postal mail.<p>Online shopping was catalog shopping.<p>References, information, and entertainment (as well as advertising, <i>without</i> tracking or pop-ups) were performed via books, encyclopedias, newspapers, and magazines.  Phonographs provided audio, as well as over-the-air radio broadcasts.  Libraries provided extended access.<p>Latencies were higher, but the throughput of even a horse-drawn cart is pretty good.