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Tubes – A Journey to the Center of the Internet (Book)

[Philip Lelyveld comment: this book is a throughly engaging tale of the history, structure, and map of the physical internet.  The servers, switchers, cables, etc.  At a high level,the internet is like home construction - a lot of simple pieces repeated over and over again, and the art is how well they are built together.  The internet is not as geographically disbursed, or as immune to attack as I've been lead to believe.]

Tubes – A Journey to the Center of the Internet

By Andrew Blum

2012

Selected quotes from the first half

Pg. 47 – on the origin of the internet

I asked (UCLA Prof. and ‘father of the internet’) Kleinrock about this: Why isn’t essence a word we typically talk about in the context of the Internet itself?  It’s more often the opposite that thrills us: the network’s ease at instant reproduction, its ability to make things “viral,” with the consequence of threatening not only the aura but also our desire for it – leading us to watch a concert through a smartphone screen.  “For the same reason people don’t know when it was created or where it started, or what the first message was,” he said.  “It’s an interesting psychological and sociological commentary that people are not curious about it. It’s like oxygen.  People don’t ask where oxygen comes from.”

Pg. 71 – on living in Palo Alto

When I lived there, the faithful who fill the cafes always reminded me of priests in Rome, fingering smartphones rather than rosary beads, but similarly sticking close, for reasons both practical and spiritual, to the center of power.  They are all there to connect: the gambling venture capitalists, the Stanford engineers, the lawyers and MBAs, and the start-up junkies who smell the future like bloodhounds.

Pg. 107 – on describing the internet

The writer Christine Smallwood is on to something when she points out that “the history of the Internet is a history of metaphors about the Internet, all stumbling around this dilemma: How do we talk to each other about an invisible god?”

Pg. 107 – on the South Park “Over Logging” episode

…the squat, obnoxious little characters faced a particularly extreme case of a familiar dilemma: the Internet breaks, everywhere.  First they try to figure out if this is really happening, but “there’s no Internet to find out there’s no Internet!” a character deadpans.

Pg. 118 – on Internet traffic flow

From out here, the Internet appears to have no texture, no grain; with rare exceptions, there’s no “weather” – conditions don’t change day to day.

Yet looked at from within, the Internet is handmade, one link at a time.  And it’s always expanding.  The constant growth of Internet traffic requires the constant growth of the Internet itself, both in the thickness of its pipes and the geographic reach of individual networks.  For the engineers, that means a network not busy being born is busy dying.

Pg. 120 – the human side of the internet architecture

A NANOG (North American Network Operators’ Group) meeting is the human manifestation of the Internet’s logical links.  It exists to cement the social bonds that underscore the Internet’s technical bonds – a chemical process aided by ample bandwidth and beer.

[You can see all the information you need to ‘peer’ your network with facebook at www.facebook.com/peering]

Pg. 134 – on internet exchanges

I can’t say I was surprised that the Internet was run by wizards – it had to be run by somebody.  But I as surprised by how few they were.

Pg. 179 – on fiber cables

It reminded me how much the Internet’s physical presence was defined by the spaces between – whether inside the routers, or at the building point of entry.