Tubes
A Journey to the Center of the Internet
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Everybody knows that the Internet is the most powerful information network ever conceived. It is a gateway to information, a messenger of love and a fountain of riches and distraction. We are all connected now, but connected to what? In Tubes, acclaimed young journalist Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey to find out.
As Blum writes, the Internet is tangible: it fills buildings, converges in some places in the world and avoids others, and it flows through tubes—along train lines and highways, and under oceans. You can map it, smell it and see it. As Tom Vanderbilt does in his bestselling Traffic, Blum goes behind the scenes of our everyday lives and combines first-rate reporting and engaging explanation into a fast-paced quest to explain the world in which we live. The room in Los Angeles where the Internet was born; the busy hub in downtown Toronto that links Canada with the world; a new undersea cable that connects West Africa and Europe; and the Great Pyramids of our time, the monumental data centres that Google and Facebook have built in the wilds of Oregon—Blum visits them all to chronicle the dramatic story of the Internet’s development and explain how it all works.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating
A fascinating, prosaic and eminently accessible look at the physical infrastructure we all take for granted.
Wonderful!
A non-technical look, story really, about the Internet. Surprisingly fresh and personal, this authour gives a detailed and interesting view of how everything on the Internet, including this very review gets sent, stored and resent around the world. He makes the mundane interesting and puts a 'real' face on those screens in front of us.