![]() Writing about it necessitates a lot of banging around through meatspace. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. FLAG, its origins and its enemies.Ĭity of George Town, Island of Penang, MalaysiaįLAG, 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. Bizarre Spectacles in the jungles of southern Thailand. ![]() Advantages of chastity, both for hacker tourists and for cable layers. ![]() Rubber, Penang's chief commodity, and its many uses: protecting wires from the elements and concupiscent wanderers from harmful DNA. In which the Hacker Tourist encounters: Penang, a microcosm of the Internet. 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. 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. 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. Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without founding whole new fields of scientific inquiry and generating many lucrative patents. But it quickly became evident that it was best to keep the number of individual wires as low as possible and find clever ways to fit more information onto them. Some of the early technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted to use 26-wire cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. A web of wires was spun across every modern city on the globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Perhaps this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel Morse stretched a wire between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the first message he sent with his code was "What hath God wrought!"-almost as if he needed to reassure himself and others that God, and not the Devil, was behind it.ĭuring the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented. Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people's hair stand up on end in more than just the purely electrical sense-it must have seemed supernatural. The financial districts of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands of wires, are much closer to each other than, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. This article is about what will, for a short time anyway, be the biggest and best wire ever made. This can be accomplished in three basic ways: moving physical media around, broadcasting radiation through space, and sending signals through wires. Moving to it has rarely been popular and is growing unfashionable nowadays we demand that the information come to us. In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of WIRED.
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