Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

“Pinoy-grams.” Randy manages to suppress the urge to tell her that the name is trademarked. “Pinoy-grams?” “Here’s how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It’s about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place—they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself, and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It’s highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.” “What’s the magic? It sends the video down the phone line?” “Right.” “Haven’t people being messing around with video phones for a long time?” “The difference here is our software. We don’t try to send the video in real time—that’s too expensive. We store the data at central servers, then take advantage of lulls, when traffic is low through the undersea cables, and shoot the data down those cables when time can be had cheap. Eventually the data winds up at Epiphyte’s facility in Intramuros. From there we can use wireless technology to send the data to 24 Jam stores all over Metro Manila. The store just needs a ...