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

keep the number of individual wires as low as possible and find clever ways to fit more
information onto them.

This requires more ingenuity than you might think - wires have never been perfectly
transparent carriers of data; they have always degraded the information put into them. In
general, this gets worse as the wire gets longer, and so as the early telegraph networks
spanned greater distances, the people building them had to edge away from the
seat-of-the-pants engineering practices that, applied in another field, gave us so many boiler
explosions, and toward the more scientific approach that is the standard of practice today.

Still, telegraphy, like many other forms of engineering, retained a certain barnyard, improvised
quality until the Year of Our Lord 1858, when the terrifyingly high financial stakes and
shockingly formidable technical challenges of the first transatlantic submarine cable brought
certain long-simmering conflicts to a rolling boil, incarnated the old and new approaches in the
persons of Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and Professor William Thomson, respectively, and brought
the conflict between them into the highest possible relief in the form of an inquiry and a scandal
that rocked the Victorian world. Thomson came out on top, with a new title and name - Lord
Kelvin.

Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the
1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century
California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable
projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke's book How the World Was One). The only things that
have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more
bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without founding whole new fields
of scientific inquiry and generating many lucrative patents. Undersea cables, and long-distance
communications in general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same
connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or brain surgery would acquire in later
decades. Some countries and companies (the distinction between countries and companies is
hazy in the telco world) became very good at it, and some didn't. AT&T acquired a dominance of
the field that largely continues to this day and is only now being seriously challenged by a
project called FLAG: the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe.



In which the Hacker Tourist encounters: Penang, a microcosm of the Internet. Rubber,
Penang's chief commodity, and its many uses: protecting wires from the elements and
concupiscent wanderers from harmful DNA. Advantages of chastity, both for hacker
tourists and for cable layers. Bizarre Spectaclesin the jungles of southern Thailand.
FLAG, its origins and its enemies.

5° 241 24.932' N, 100° 241 19.748' E City of George Town, Island of Penang, Malaysia

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an
inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big
things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the
longest engineering project in history. Writing about it necessitates a lot of banging around
through meatspace. Over the course of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six