"Neal Stephenson - Mother Earth Mother Board" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Archive | 4.12 - Dec 1996 | features




Mother Earth Mother Board

The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three
continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.

By Neal Stephenson




In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace
of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic
Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable
Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean
Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk;
also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of
global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and
technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the
longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired.

Information moves, or we move to it. Moving to it has rarely been popular and is growing
unfashionable; nowadays we demand that the information come to us. This can be
accomplished in three basic ways: moving physical media around, broadcasting radiation
through space, and sending signals through wires. This article is about what will, for a short
time anyway, be the biggest and best wire ever made.

Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at
opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on
opposite sides of the planet. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the
geometry of the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. The financial districts
of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands of wires, are much closer to each other
than, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan.

Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down
the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people's hair stand
up on end in more than just the purely electrical sense - it must have seemed supernatural.
Perhaps this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel Morse stretched a wire between
Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the first message he sent with his code was "What hath God
wrought!" - almost as if he needed to reassure himself and others that God, and not the Devil,
was behind it.
During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes,
signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented. A web of wires was
spun across every modern city on the globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Some
of the early technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted to use 26-wire
cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. But it quickly became evident that it was best to