Tubes : a journey to the center of the Internet

Tubes A journey to the center of the Internet

Andrew Blum

Book - 2012

When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives--and the broader scheme of human culture--can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now. In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our networks ...by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers--Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet's development, explains how it all works, and takes the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments. This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the "placelessness" of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact "a series of tubes" as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know its parts? Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine or Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller Traffic, Tubes combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.

Saved in:
Place a Hold Save to List Email this

2nd Floor Show me where

303.4834/Blum
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 303.4834/Blum Checked In
Subjects
Internet.
Internet > History.
Internet > Social aspects.
Telecommunication systems.
Information technology.
Information superhighway.
Published
New York : Ecco c2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Andrew Blum (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
294 p. ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780061994937
  • The map
  • A network of networks
  • Only connect
  • The whole Internet
  • Cities of light
  • The longest tubes
  • Where data sleeps .
Review by Choice Review

This book's primary focus is the infrastructural components and facilities of the Internet and the everyday people who work in those facilities. Tubes would be useful for readers interested in mass communications and management information systems. It may lack the detail level for those in engineering and computer science fields, but it would still be a fun read for this audience. The author's approach is similar to that of a travel guide. Blum (journalist) writes in the first person, talking about his own experiences during his travels to the world's major network infrastructures; readers will feel that they are vicariously visiting these high-security locations themselves. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the book has no images. This is not surprising; given the locations the author visits, it is doubtful that anyone would be able to take photos. Of particular interest is the section describing the peer exchange process between the tier 1 networks. The book does not impart any specific techniques that are useful, but, overall, readers will come away with a better holistic understanding of how the Internet infrastructure runs and the character of the people who work in that environment. Summing Up: Recommended. All students, general readers, and professionals. S. A. Patton Indiana State University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

In 1969 a machine called the interface message processor, or IMP, was installed at UCLA under the supervision of a young professor named Leonard Kleinrock. This was the first packet-switching node in a network called ARPANET, which would later become the Internet. Blum begins his journey to discover the physical presence of the Internet by visiting Kleinrock and IMP, both still ensconced at UCLA. Blum visits cable landing stations that house entry points for the longest tubes, the undersea fiber-optic cables that connect all the continents on the globe, where bits and bytes of information enter the cable as light at one end and come out the other end across the Atlantic Ocean. Taking a tour of the cloud proves to be a bit of a challenge, but Blum gets a peek at some of the data centers with their servers, routers, and cables all efficiently cooled and humming along, storing your Facebook photos or e-mails. Blum reminds us that cyberspace isn't just a virtual place to visit out there, but rather a real, growing physical network consuming vast amounts of electricity and resources.--Siegfried, David Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Here Blum (correspondent, Wired; contributing editor, Metropolis) attempts to understand the infrastructure of the Internet. He reflects on his travels and recounts conversations with people who founded, helped understand, maintained, or developed the Internet's physical presence. Blum visits Leonard Kleinrock, one of the fathers of the Internet, who wrote the first paper on packet switching-the concept that information can be transmitted in small chunks. He also meets with Markus Krisetya, a cartographer employed by TeleGeography whose work maps the Internet across the globe. Most web users rarely think about the infrastructure of the Internet, but more technically savvy readers may find Blum's reflections wear thin. VERDICT Blum might have conveyed in fewer pages his conclusion that the Internet is everywhere and is, "in fact, a series of tubes." Of interest to the general reader with a beginning curiosity about the infrastructure of the Internet, this title is not recommended for more knowledgeable readers in the history, politics, or sociology of technology and the Internet. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/11.]-Jon Bodnar, Emory Univ., Atlanta (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Captivating behind-the-scenes tour of how (and where) the Internet works. When an errant squirrel disrupted his Internet connection, Wired correspondent Blum embarked on a journey to discover the roots and structure of the Internet. Taking its title from former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens' much-ridiculed 2006 description of the Internet as "a series of tubes," this debut deftly combines history, travelogue and jargon-free technical explanations. Blum begins by chronicling the birth of the Internet in the late 1960s. He traveled to UCLA to see one of the first networked computers and meet 75-year-old professor Leonard Kleinrock, one of the fathers of the Internet. From there, Blum visited the companies that form the Internet's "backbone": hubs of networked servers where billions of bits of data zip through every second. Travelling around the world, the author was surprised to discover that "the Internet wasn't a shadowy realm but a surprisingly open one." Nearly everywhere he went, he was offered a tour by people happy to share their work and expertise (Google's data center was the lone exception). While Blum occasionally gets bogged down by the technical ins and outs of servers and cable routing, which may not interest some readers, he has a gift for breathing life into his subjects, including Eddie Diaz, an electrical worker the author followed as he installed thousands of feet of new cable under the streets of Manhattan. A fascinating and unique portrait of the Internet not as "a physical world or a virtual world, but a human world."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Similar Items