I just read an excellent book (Tubes, by Andrew Blum, published by ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins) that addresses the physical nature of the internet . It is about the author’s global journey through everything from hubs, interchanges, cable stations, and data centers to the tiny glass fibers and the lasers that must pulse thousands of billions of times per second. It has characters, narrative, and even a bit of travelogue as well as information about the hardware - a book by a good writer and journalist whose specialty is technology. My historian wife has even agreed to read it, and I predict she will love it. It will add depth to her ever-present iphone and ipad.
A subject of great attention these days now seems to be “the cloud”, and since I am an engineer, my friends occasionally ask me about the nature of this cloud to which computer people refer . I realize that people who use the term are speaking of information, but to most people, clouds are the white things in the sky, and this cloud is not like water vapor. It is the use of the internet by companies to provide more services to us, and as this book explains, the internet consists of a very large collection of sometimes messy looking hardware, most of it under ground, on the ocean floor, or in huge, often anonymous, buildings in low-rent districts.
One of my missions in life is to help people understand modern technology, and I think the adoption of “cloud” is unfortunate. It is good for the internet service providers, because it lends an air of mystery and god-like importance to them and to the internet, and allows them to provide further services in the form of software and data storage, But the providers want us in their particular "cloud", and maybe don’t want us to realize that not only is this not a revolutionary concept, but much of the cloud is located in locations such as old rusty tubes next to the sewer under New York streets, and in hot ugly buildings dominated by the loud noise of cooling fans and cursing technicians splicing glass filaments. Nor the fact that an estimated 8% of the electrical power in the U. S. is already consumed by the internet. Real clouds don’t utilize coal for fuel.
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