Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Book Cover
book
BookBook
Author Blum, Andrew.

Title Tubes : a journey to the center of the Internet / Andrew Blum.

Publication Info. New York, NY : Ecco, [2012]
©2012

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Avon Free Public Library - Adult Department  384.3 BLUM    Check Shelf
 Bristol, Main Library - Non Fiction  384 B625    DUE 04-09-24
 Farmington, Main Library - Adult Department  004.67 BLU    Check Shelf
 Manchester, Main Library - Non Fiction  384.309 BLUM    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  384.3 B62    Check Shelf
 Newington, Lucy Robbins Welles Library - Adult Department  384.3 BLUM    Check Shelf
 Rocky Hill, Cora J. Belden Library - Adult Department  384.309 BLUM    Check Shelf
 University of Saint Joseph: Pope Pius XII Library - Standard Shelving Location  004.678 B658T    Check Shelf
 Windsor Locks Public Library - Adult Department  384.309 BLU    Check Shelf
 Windsor, Main Library - Adult Department  384.309 BL    Check Shelf
Edition First edition.
Description 294 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-280) and index.
Contents The map -- A network of networks -- Only connect -- The whole Internet -- Cities of light -- The longest tubes -- Where data sleeps -- Home.
Summary 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.
Subject Internet -- History.
Internet -- Social aspects.
Telecommunication systems.
Information technology.
Information superhighway.
ISBN 9780061994937 alkaline paper $26.99
0061994936 alkaline paper
-->
Add a Review