Using Desktop Google I found an email from Ross Stapleton-Gray (author of An Internet of Less Than Solid Things, among others), saying
zCommerce is to eBay, as radio is to telegraph… (“eBay, except there’s no cat!”)
citing the Einstein cat story:
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
–Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio.