Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

by Andrew Blum (Goodreads Author)

3.35 of 5 stars 3.35 · rating details · 599 ratings · 163 reviews

When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives--and the broader scheme of human culture--can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its mat...more When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives--and the broader scheme of human culture--can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now.

In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our networks by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers--Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet's development, explains how it all works, and takes the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments.

This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the "placelessness" of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact "a series of tubes" as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know its parts?

Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine or Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller Traffic, Tubes combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.(less)

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published May 29th 2012 by Ecco (first published May 15th 2012)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

All Your Base Are Belong to Us by Harold Goldberg

Nonfiction About Video Games and Virtual Reality

10th out of 20 books — 6 voters

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

Top Books That Made You Look At The World In A Whole New Way

42nd out of 66 books — 9 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 2,021)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Jan 31, 2013 Maggiemuggins rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Seniors who are trying to keep up!

Recommended to Maggiemuggins by: My local library

If your imagination has difficulty getting around what seem to be the 'smoke and mirrors' of the internet, puzzle no more. Andrew Blum has come to the rescue after travelling the globe poking his nose, politely, into the deepest, darkest, coldest and most carefully guarded nooks and crannies of the bones, muscle and flesh of the internet. His writing style flows comfortably from page to page, from country to country and back again and, as Blum progresses, comprehension dawns, for him and the rea...more

like · see review

Aug 25, 2012 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

I found this book to be engaging and informative, but I would have preferred more description and less philosophizing.

An errant squirrel chewing through Mr. Blum's cable wire launches him on a journey to understand the physical nature of the Internet. This takes him from a key site in the origin of the academic internet (Len Kleinrock's IMP at Berkeley) through its transition to anarchic commercial interconnections at sites like MAE East in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, where packets were sometimes...more

like · see review

Aug 01, 2012 J rated it 2 of 5 stars

An ambitious attempt to balance a technical, psychological and sociological examination of the "Internet." Ultimately, the book fails to advance any meaningful analysis. Blum's self-imposed task was to find physical infrastructure components of the global internet, but instead he drowns us in aspirational language more concerned with the wonder of modern inter-connectivity than the task at hand. Fancy literary references make it seem Blum is more familiar with liberal arts curriculum than anythi...more

like 7 likes · see review

Apr 21, 2012 Loring Wirbel rated it 3 of 5 stars

If I was to rate this on the quality of writing alone, Blum could win a high 4, maybe a 5, for the richness of his descriptive passages, particularly in the parts on the cable landing stations in Cornwall or the modernization of The Dalles in Oregon. Let's face it, Blum can write well and engagingly. Nevertheless, even in the writing style there are a few nagging problems. His tendency to use quotes from literary sources like Emerson or J.G. Ballard is OK when limited to once or twice in a sing...more If I was to rate this on the quality of writing alone, Blum could win a high 4, maybe a 5, for the richness of his descriptive passages, particularly in the parts on the cable landing stations in Cornwall or the modernization of The Dalles in Oregon. Let's face it, Blum can write well and engagingly. Nevertheless, even in the writing style there are a few nagging problems. His tendency to use quotes from literary sources like Emerson or J.G. Ballard is OK when limited to once or twice in a single book, but after a while the use of such quotes sounds a little too grad-student for my tastes.

There were passages that were just trite or silly, as well - the squirrel chewing up cable, complete with exclamation points in the text; the description of Silicon Valley as startup mecca, when that description even seemed dated and pedestrian in the 1980s; and the reference to The Dalles as a digital Kathmandu. Don't get me wrong, I like the Zen aspects of Blum's search, it's just that one must be careful in using these analogies at getting too starry-eyed. Also, he gets a trifle over-dramatic in confronting the secrecy of Google and other companies in dealing with data center locations. If Blum was like James Bamford, chasing down the location of snooping centers of intelligence agencies, he'd have reason to feel paranoid. Here, his fears just seem silly.

But there is another aspect of Blum's work that makes me rank the book in the high-3's, albeit moving closer to 4. I disagree with the nature of his quest and the way he chooses to pursue it. I know, I know, that sounds like a reviewer for a travel book who says he wished the writer had gone to Spain instead of Kazakhstan. But bear with me.

Blum rightly sees a certain spiritual quest in examining the communication protocol layers of the Internet, and there's an argument to be made for treating the Open Systems Interconnect seven-layer stack as a mysterious bardo. But Blum sees the bottom two layers, physical and data-link, as representing physical macro-geography. And that's where network engineers raise their eyebrows at his quest. Does it matter whether the data center is in The Dalles or Prineville? Does it matter whether a Cisco or Brocade router sits at the center? Does it matter the locations on the planet where networks aggregate? Some might talk about planetary magnetic fields and ley lines and say, "Oh yes it does." Maybe so, but by spending too much time on large-scale geography, you miss the spiritual layers underneath.

To really make some good analogies of the type Blum strives for, you need to understand the underlying chip architectures and middle-ware software responsible for dissecting packets and putting them back together. You need to understand the Zen of Ethernet switching, multi-protocol label switching, and dense wave-division multiplexing. Then you need to be able to translate that in a way your grandmother can understand. Does that mean one needs a BSEE or geekdom certification? No, but it means one needs to go deeper into the technology than Blum did.

A similar problem exists when he equates the physical backbone of the Internet with fiber optics. This is true today, but the optics might some day be replaced by millimeter-wave radio or some sort of quantum-computing "weird action at a distance." The key to the Internet's center is bandwidth itself, and optical switching is merely the best current manifestation.

The reason this matters is that several books that made a technology deep-dive on the history and nature of the Internet were released 10 to 15 years ago, such as Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" (1996). A lot has happened to the Internet since then, but Blum had to show he could tackle the more recent nuances and still come out with something that moved beyond the Hafner/Lyon book.

I still think this book is worth a read for learning some details of specific place - the paranoid secrecy of Google officials in discussing their data centers, for example, teaches us that Google is a lot creepier than Facebook in its own way. Blum's talents could be put to future use - he would be a great candidate to join with James Bamford in dissecting the new NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah, for example. But I can't help but feel this book would have been a lot more interesting if Blum had used his Zen quest to dive deeper into the underlying chips and software that make the Internet hum.(less)

like 3 likes · see review

Dec 25, 2012 Sheri rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

This was one of those books that I saw sitting on the ebookshelf and thought that it would be good for me to read. Not because anyone recommended it or because I have a particular interest (although considering that I earn my living running an internet-based business that my husband and I built from scratch I do have quite a vested interest in the internet per say) in the topic, but because I feel like I should know more about the internet. I guess it was kind of the same way I picked up Barbara...more

like · see review

Jul 31, 2012 Heather rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, library-books

Around Chapter 4, when Blum visits the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, the book got significantly more interesting to me: where in earlier chapters Blum was focused a lot on background/history and the various things he learned from various key people, the focus here shifts to what he sees. In Amsterdam, it occurs to Blum that he could/should see things in a bit of a different way from the corporate-approved tours he's been getting. He's found a map of data centers in the Netherlands and sees that t...more Around Chapter 4, when Blum visits the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, the book got significantly more interesting to me: where in earlier chapters Blum was focused a lot on background/history and the various things he learned from various key people, the focus here shifts to what he sees. In Amsterdam, it occurs to Blum that he could/should see things in a bit of a different way from the corporate-approved tours he's been getting. He's found a map of data centers in the Netherlands and sees that there are plenty in Amsterdam—so he convinces a routing-table analyst to go on an 8-mile urban hike with him, to see the buildings from the outside. This results in a really pleasing section in which Blum talks about Robert Smithson's "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic" (which I haven't read, but clearly should) and how it argues "that there is value in noticing what we normally ignore, that there can be a kind of artistry in the found landscape, and its unconventional beauty can tell us something important about ourselves" (151). So Blum walks and looks, and we get passages like this:

Our first data center was visible from the elevated train platform: a menacing concrete bunker the size of a small office building, with worn-out blue window trim, spreading out along a canal connecting to the Amstel River. The late-winter day was gray and damp, and there were houseboats tied up at the edge of the still water. My map indicated that the building belonged to Verizon, but a sign on the door said MFS—the vestigial initials of Metropolitan Fiber Systems, [...] which Verizon had acquired years before. There was clearly no rush to keep up appearances; it seemed, rather, that its new owners preferred the building to disappear. (152)

In the next chapter, after visiting a router manufacturer in San Jose, Blum comes back to New York and spends a night watching a crew lay fiber optic cable in lower Manhattan. He talks about how, rather than being something totally new, the Internet infrastructure in a place like New York is layered on/builds off the pre-existing infrastructure from telegraph and telephone systems. This chapter was also super-pleasing to me because Blum talks about two buildings in lower Manhattan that have a telecommunications history—the old Western Union building at 60 Hudson and the old AT&T Building at 32 Avenue of the Americas—one of which is the building where I work. Both buildings are "art deco palaces" (it's true) and when they were built, each apparently had its own "gymnasium, library, training school, even dormitories." In 1955, the first transatlantic telephone cable went from 32 Avenue of the Americas to London. And now? As Blum puts it of 32 Avenue of the Americas, "on the twenty-fourth floor is the Internet" (176). Each of these buildings houses its own Internet exchange, and in that sense, as Blum notes, they're not so different from the other ones he visited: except that they're "a fact of geography," an outgrowth of the New York of the early twentieth century, twenty-first-century spaces "built upon hundred-year-old telephone infrastructure, nestled between stock exchanges and railroad tracks" (ibid.).

Those middle chapters were the most exciting to me, but the remainder of the book is interesting, too. Blum is a smart and engaging writer, and while the first three chapters sometimes felt like a slog, I was pleased with this book by the end, and quite glad to have read it. (less)

like 1 like · see review

Jan 17, 2013 Artur Coelho rated it 2 of 5 stars

O ponto de interesse deste livro é o olhar a internet com uma rara fisicalidade. Habituados à visão dos bits desincorporados, da informação digital como algo de etéreo e das virtualidades como uma atmosfera que nos rodeia, esquecemo-nos do carácter eminentemente físico da internet. Da espantosa, intricada, vasta e complexa infraestrutura global que liga computadores, servidores, fornecedores de serviços e utilizadores. Tubes mergulha-nos nesse mundo de vastos datacenters a surgir nas paisagens a...more

like · see review

Aug 12, 2012 Birgit rated it 3 of 5 stars

Who has never wondered what the internet is actually made of? We know it's there, somewhere, but is there an actual place the internet can be found? This question answers Andrew Blum in his book Tubes and the title (almost) reveals it all.
If you're anything like me, namely pretty clueless as to why technical things in general work, yet willing get a better understanding about why it's even possible to surf the net by the click of a mouse, you will certainly find this book as appealing as I did....more

like · see review

Jun 21, 2012 Colleen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Here's my official review: http://www.techzone360.com/topics/tec...

--
This book was good. I have always wondered about the Internet's physicality, and I'm glad I picked this book up because I got my answer. Also as an English major, writer, and overall lover of the written word, I liked how the book didn't flash around its technical language, but included excerpts from literature and popular culture. This really was the way to learn more about the Internet for me, and it was an enjoyable read for...more

like · see review

Feb 18, 2013 Brad McKenna rated it 3 of 5 stars

When journalist Andrew Blum loses his internet connection thanks to the teeth of a squirrel, it gets him wondering about the architecture of the internet. Most people think of it as an amorphous "cloud" but there is a physical architecture to it as well. So off he goes in search of it.

He travels around the world and sees the literal tubes that carry the data, the Internet Exchanges that connect networks to other networks (which is all the internet really is), and even some of the Data Centers i...more

like · see review

Sep 19, 2012 Anne rated it 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book, after initial skepticism about the approach--essentially tracking Blum's own journey from obliviousness to informed state vis-a-vis the physical artifacts of the interweb. He's not so much a physics/materiality guy, more of an infrastructure geek. His faux naive question is, basically, where IS the internet, anyway? He looks at data centers, cable-laying operations, tons of machines. Good interviews and characterizations--the wow of something being "cyberrific" (93), the "hair...more

like · see review

May 08, 2013 Nancy rated it 2 of 5 stars

The author makes a valiant attempt to make wires, routers, closets, and metal buildings interesting. The truth that he coveys IS truly interesting - that "the cloud" is a myth, that the Internet is a very real physical network patched together by guys with pliers crawling around underground, up on scaffolding, and on the seas. But in his desperation to stretch what would have been an excellent long-form magazine article into a 268-page book, Blum is reduced to describing the interiors of hotel r...more

like · see review

Dec 28, 2012 Julia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: new-to-me-2012, non-fiction, 2012-completed

Perhaps it's because I really don't know how the internet works, on a nitty-gritty, hardware level. Perhaps it's because I can't keep track of more than a few acronyms and e-speak-isms at a time. But while I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, and found myself interested to read more, I came out feeling that I learned little, and that the book actually resolved remarkably few of the questions it ostensibly seeks to address. Maybe that was the author's intention; certainly he comments sever...more

like · see review

Aug 07, 2012 Subroto rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

This was better as a magazine at best a sunday special 4 page article in your local daily.

The writer tries to bite off far more than a chronological or evolutionary understanding of how the union of various disjointed separate (in every sense of the word) networks and therefore people brought together today something so decentralized - and yet so joint at all times - this all encompassing and so powerful entity which we take almost for granted every day.

Intentions as you can see were very noble...more

like · see review

Aug 21, 2012 Jon Cassie rated it 3 of 5 stars

I liked "Tubes," but in fairness, I wanted to like it a lot more. Blum asked the kind of question I bet a lot of us have asked - exactly where is the Internet? A fair question, and one that most of us don't know the answer to - particularly if we mocked Sen. Ted Stephens' infamous "it's a series of tubes comment." Turns out, Stephens was largely right. The question of where the Internet is got Blum to range far and wide and to visit strange buildings whose only purpose is to route Internet traff...more

like 1 like · see review

Aug 07, 2012 Liam rated it 4 of 5 stars

"This book chronicles my effort at turning that imagined place into a real one. It is an account of the physical world. The Internet may seem to be everywhere -- and in many ways it is -- but it is also very clearly in some places more than others. The single whole is an illusion. The Internet has crossroads and superhighways, large monuments and quiet chapels. Our every day experience of the Internet obscures that geography, flattening it and speeding it up beyond recognition." (8)

"New links do...more

like · see review

Oct 04, 2012 Margaret Sankey rated it 3 of 5 stars

After having a good laugh about Senator Ted Stevens describing the internet as a series of tubes, Blum realized that he was kind of right and set out to visit the physical infrastructure of the internet, from the underwater cable connecting Africa and Portugal, the many nondescript office parks housing routers in what he describes as underguarded former plumbing supply warehouses, the birthplace of the modern internet in Silicon Valley and the new outposts of traffic in such places as Louden Cou...more

like · see review

Nov 03, 2012 Nathan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: popcomp, abandoned

An excellent glimpse into the people, buildings, and subculture of Internet network engineering. The author works hard, and at times succeeds, but I felt he wasn't able to make the topic interesting for the duration of the entire book. I gave up in the last quarter, feeling I had wrung all from the book that I could reasonably expect to do.

The Internet, Cyberspace, this virtual bodyless place which transcends countries ... is very much a thing built from physical objects which reside in, and con...more

like · see review

Dec 18, 2012 John rated it 3 of 5 stars

More like 3.5 stars. Blum's book is basically a layman's guide to the actual physical infrastructure (the "tubes") of the Internet. It's a topic that's very important and often overlooked. The main takeaway is that the Internet is less decentralized than you think. It's a lot like a series of airports -- it depends on major hubs. And the network itself follows the routes of very old trade patterns (e.g., NY to London), in part b/c that's where the old telegraph and telephone infrastructure was....more

like · see review

Mar 13, 2013 Kent Winward rated it 3 of 5 stars

An amusing diversion of a tech book exploring the hard realities of the internet infrastructure. Yet, the title is misleading, since the "I"nternet is really centered on you in sort of a Ptolemaic reversal where the user is the center of a diversified mass of cables, routers, blinking lights and desktops. If Alice goes down the Internet rabbit hole, she gets broken into packets, re-routed and reconstituted wherever she is called. Blum tries to invoke the Transcendentalist calling on Emerson and...more

like · see review

Jul 08, 2012 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book's publicist did all the right things in marketing the book: bright cover, "Fresh Air" interview, reviews in the NYT, WSJ, Economist. Heck it may have benefitted from physics interest from the Higgs Boson announcement. And I have a hard time believing that nobody thought of this earlier so I was excited to read about something that isn't tragic or have a lot of attached controversy.

The writing is excellent and the author does a good job of making something technical and hard to describe...more

like · see review

Dec 19, 2012 Bookworm Smith rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: did-not-meet-expectations

Following that cord from your computer to the 'internet' is the general idea behind this book. What would it look like? How does it actually work? Good idea, me thinks. Andrew Blum does a great job at describing it all. But, (yes, a big but)...this would have made a lovely magazine article. As it turns out making a book about it was taking it just a few steps too far.

Overall, there is very little to the 'internet'; little variety that is. The internet is huge and spreads across the entire globe,...more Following that cord from your computer to the 'internet' is the general idea behind this book. What would it look like? How does it actually work? Good idea, me thinks. Andrew Blum does a great job at describing it all. But, (yes, a big but)...this would have made a lovely magazine article. As it turns out making a book about it was taking it just a few steps too far.

Overall, there is very little to the 'internet'; little variety that is. The internet is huge and spreads across the entire globe, but, as it turns out there is really only wire and a surprisingly low number of routers. This books shows us that...from a dozen different angles.

Turns out if you send an email from your computer it goes through your home router, down a wire, to the local provider's router, down some more wire, to an 'exchange' (code for another router), where it goes along some more wire, to another exchange (aka router), along even more wire, to the last router, where it is pushed up a wire to its destination. So, let me sum it up in easy-speak-chant :

*clears throat* wire, router, wire, router, wire, router, wire, router...

There. That is pretty much the bones of this book.

Blum tries to add some interesting guts to these bones, but, he doesn't have much to work with. He describes the uniform routers and wire that make up the internet in extreme detail and poetic prose, but, again I can sum it up in easy-speak-chant:

*clears throat* black cable, blinky router lights, yellow cable, blinky router lights, thick cable, blinky router lights, underwater cable, blinky router lights...

Even when he starts to describe the people who work on the 'internet', they are surprisingly bland - computer nerds in hoodies leaning over a laptop (they all seem to have very little social skills as well). There is one spark of life when Blum goes on an overnight shift with some blue collar cable layers under the streets of NYC. But, for the most part the IT people sounded very boring.

I was left hoping for more. Again, Blum does a great job at describing the limited parts of the internet, I can picture how beautiful a refrigerator sized router can look bathed in the soft glow of fluorescent lights, but, you can only read so much of the same thing. It wasn't his words that were repetitive, it was the content. I'd say read Andrew Blum, but, just not this book.(less)

like · see review

Aug 15, 2012 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

A travelogue of a different kind. Looking at the geography of the internet requires physical travel and the ability to apply metaphors to that which can't be seen. Andrew Blum travels the route of the internet to discover how much it still relies on the old geography of past trade routes. His story benefits from the willingness of internet companies and engineers to show him the guts of internet. Google is the one exception--his visit to their data center is by his own admission a "farce" where...more

like · see review

Feb 09, 2013 Jeramey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: technology

I've been to the end of the Internet and back with Andrew Blum. Strangely, it felt like we spent a lot of time going to the same place (which when I run a traceroute request, it might look like that as well). The author probably would have been better off spending less time exploring changes, and more time exploring data centers and internet service providers.

I was interested in learning more about quirky and weird aspects of the internet. My office is a mere block away from the Wells Building (...more

like · see review

Jun 03, 2012 Jon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Overall, I liked Tubes. It connects history, geography, and sociology to explain the fragile, physical nature of the Internet.

This is a physical geography book, and it reads like a traveler's journal. A causal read, Blum attempts to give a tangible face to the abstract idea of the Internet. It's not a super technical read either. He writes from the perspective of a curious end user. I often get bored of popular computer writing because it typically oversimplifies things which I already understan...more

like · see review

Dec 26, 2012 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this, an interesting and different view of the internet, concentrating on the physical aspects such as the internet exchanges, cables and data centres that create the illusion of the cloud.

Blum is an architectural as well technological journalist so describes the, often drab and deliberately anonymous, buildings and their varied locations. He describes the journeys he takes and the people he meets who keep the internet running.

At times it feels more like travel writing than a...more

like · see review

Jul 30, 2012 Jacob rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: books_from_dad

This is a mildly interesting idea for a book: the author gets it into his head that he needs to understand the physical structure underlying the Internet and writes a book about his experiences. I understand the basic underpinnings of the Internet in terms of routers, fiber, and data centers, so to me this is much more a travelogue of places the author went and people he met. It's readable and interesting if you like reading or watching about other locations in the world. However, I suspect the...more

like 1 like · see review

Jul 16, 2012 Ken rated it 2 of 5 stars

Overall, this was a disappointing book. The author had a technical subject matter -- the book could have read like a technical manual, though it didn't -- but in trying to make it accessible, I think he basically ended up skipping the subject matter. The book is supposed to be about the internet. Really though, it's more about the author's quest to see the internet. As such, he spent (in my opinion) too much time talking about how people he met were dressed and what they were doing and not enoug...more

like 1 like · see review

Oct 24, 2012 Courtney rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an interesting book which offers the layman a glimpse of the paths that data on the internet travels. It was easy for me to understand as a technical professional. Yet the part that is often looked from the speeds and feeds perspective is that of the people and places where the connections are made. That is, a place on the planet props up a house on a hill where a cable connects the people of the planet.

I'd not given much thought to the thought that it's the people who gather together an...more

like · see review

Jul 12, 2012 Joel rated it 4 of 5 stars

I listened to this book, narrated by the author, and loved it. I think that anyone with any geek tendencies and/or a curiosity about what exactly the physical internet is, will also enjoy it. Blum is a good storyteller and also a good narrator. Beginning with a squirrel chewing his internet cable in his backyard, he takes the reader through the incredible maze of cables, routers, data centers and network connection centers around the globe. Even entering this review now has a slightly different...more

like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 67 68 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
Science and Inquiry: Tubes	2	13	Oct 05, 2012 05:20pm

combine
Other Editions (9)

More editions...

Genres

Non Fiction

46 users

Science > Technology

26 users

Science

18 users

Computer Science > Computers

4 users

History

4 users

Science > Popular Science

4 users

Internet > Web

3 users

Business

3 users

Writing > Journalism

2 users

See top shelves...

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Trivia About Tubes: Behind the...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

title link	preview: Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
avg rating	preview: Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet Goodreads rating: 3.35 (599 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13036199-tubes?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348270540l/13036199.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13036199-tubes?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum[/url]

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

combineOther Editions (9)

Genres

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Tubes: Behind the...

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (9)