Experimental Blog #140

Comments on "Tubes - A Journey to the Center of the Internet" by Andrew Blum

Among other things the Internet{the author, Andrew Blum, prefers to capitalize the word} perhaps contains trillions of silicon chips and millions of miles of just as "magical" fiber-optic cables; including hundreds of thousands of miles of undersea cables. The Internet also involves satellites, but satellite transmission is slower and more expensive. All of these things make the Internet one of the most complex "things" in the known universe.

Andrew Blum says that it all started in 1969 when 3 computers at 3 universities in California and one university in Utah formed the first computer network. These 4 universities were joined the next year by 4 universities on the east coast, which Blum says were, perhaps, more conservative. By 1989, twenty years after the beginning, there were about 159,000 computers on the Internet.

In 1991 the US Congress passed the "Gore Bill", which was named after its original sponsor, Senator Al Gore. Andrew Blum says that this "push from the government was crucial in getting the Internet out of its academic ghetto." Apparently, there are now over 2 billion computers connected to the Internet.

The Internet today includes dozens of, sometimes huge, Internet exchanges, or IXs, around the world, such as in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Moscow. The data centers of the Internet are also sometimes enormous. One "500,000-square-foot building demanding fifty megawatts of power" is "about as much as it takes to light a small city". "According to a 2010 Greenpeace report, 2 percent of the world's electricity usage can now be traced to data centers..."!!