Expedition into cyberspace

What would happen if he were to follow the copper wires and see where it led? Would that reveal the workings of the global information network? Eventually, he does just that, but first he goes back into history to find out where and how the internet got started.

That’s how he comes across one of the fathers of the internet, Leonard Kleinrock, at the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA), who shows him the IMP#1 (Interface Message Processor). The IMP, dating from 1969, was a device that could transmit data in small chunks rather than a continuous stream. The ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) looked for that feature as a basis for a flexible and reliable network. If nodes in a network went down, chunks of data would reach their destination via various detours to be reassembled at arrival. But from the first demonstration of what was called ARPA-NET to the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, progress was remarkably slow. UCLA was connected to IMP#2 in Stanford. A year later the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the East Coast was connected and another three years later London as well. ‘ARPANET wasn’t a cloud. It was a series of isolated outposts strung together by narrow roads, like a latter-day Pony Express’, wrote Blum. Various universities, research centres and companies had built computer networks, but these were not connected until the introduction of the internet protocol TCP/IP in 1982. After that, the number of networks grew exponentially from 15 in 1982 via 30,000 in 1987 to 159,000 two years later. Currently, we’re close to 13 billion people, processes and devices connected to the internet.

As Blum travels to see the internet in action, he visits the Palo Alto Internet eXchange (PAIX), a node to which clients connect their routers to get access to the internet. As he walks through the cavernous hall filled with steel cages containing steel boxes with blinking green lights, he realises how much data flashes through the centre. ‘Each fiber-optic represents up to ten gigabits per second – enough to transmit ten thousand family pictures per second. The big router has 160 of those plugged in at once, and this building was filled with hundreds of these routers. Walking through the dimly lit aisles was like hacking through an underbrush of quadrillions, an unfathomable quantity of information.’

When Blum returned to his desk at the end of the book and got on to the internet to upload his interviews, he had a pretty good idea where his bits were going. Reading this book gives you the same feeling: it provides structure to ’the cloud’.

Andrew Blum: Tubes – a journey to the center of the internet, HarperCollins Publishers 2012, 294 pages, 13 Euros.