I didn't enjoy the book very much. Although it is better than the last book we read in this class it still didn't catch my interests. I think the main culprit of this was the style of writing that the book had. It was written from a first person point of view which was very interesting to see how the author, Andrew Blum, discovered how he was connected to the internet and how the internet worked. The problem with it though was that it was jammed packed with facts and statistics. A lot of the time I felt like they were interesting, but not fascinating. The facts seemed to be used more a filler information rather than thrown in as something that was really astonishing. Sure some things caught my attention and I found really interesting, but many of those were drowned out by all the other random assorted facts. Although I didn't enjoy the book it still helped me understand a little more how the internet actually works and what it is.
One chapter that I did explore further was chapter 6 "The Longest Tubes". This chapter is about the undersea cables that connect all of the computers on the planet between each continent. This is something that I have always wondered about, but never really explored deeper. I was very surprised to learn that undersea cables actually existed way before computers. The first successful undersea cable was laid in 1858 across the English Channel. This was laid by the SS Great Eastern, which at the time was the largest ship in the world. This undersea cable was 2,700 miles long.(Blum, 203) This was used for telegraphs. The first transatlantic cable was finally finished in 1870 after multiple failed attempts, but after then British companies dominated the market for worldwide telegraph communication until the late 1920's. By 1918, 180 million words were passing through Porthcurno anually, the global hub of the telegraph network.(Blum, 204) Later then in 1988, 8 years after fiber optic cables were invented, the first fiber optic cable was laid across the Atlantic ocean. This cable is the TAT-8 and was used for telephone communication. This was a big step to where we are now because all of our undersea cables are now fiber optic because of their small size and high bandwidth without loss of information. By 2006 only 1% of international traffic was done through satellite. This shows the importance of the undersea cables have on our world today, and how much they affect our world. Then by 2012 operators were able to demonstrate long term error-free transmission without any loss at 100 Gbps across the the Atlantic Ocean. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable)
Personally I wouldn't recommend the book to a friend. I would however recommend it to my Dad. Because it's written not as much in a way to inform, but more to tell the really cool stories about how the internet came to be. Sure it explains how the internet works, but I don't think it is the most efficient way to explain that. Personally I learned more by looking up the different topics on the internet and learning about the internet that way. My Dad however would love this kind of a book because he really likes cool little stories about how things were made. Whenever he reads a book he will tell me these small stories relevant to the book which although I don't enjoy always make him more interested in what he's reading.
I think this book was selected as a book we should read because it might appeal to those who enjoy those stories like my Dad. I gets them engaged with the subject and makes a more enjoyable read instead of boring research of facts like what I tend to like. Personally I enjoy the exploration of these facts jumping between wiki pages and articles. But this book was picked to appeal to people with a different mindset who enjoy connecting what they're learning back to the history of how that came to be, and the personal stories of who created the networks that keep the current world together.
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