Broad Band

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet 
© 2018 Claire Evans
288 pages

When the ENIAC was first displayed for the public, its proponents bragged that it could do complex mathematical calculations in seconds which would have taken a skilled man hours upon hours.   Well...baloney. The ENIAC was an admirably complex array of metal, but without the human beings who had pored over its every component, turning their brains into maps of circuit boards,  creating the very language that was needed to put that array of metal to work -- it was useless. Hours and hours of human effort had gone into that little calculation, but they weren't man-hours.   The programmers of the ENIAC were six women, descendants of the calculating computer pools of the late 19th century. Broad Band is their story, and the story of other lady pioneers of the computer age.


I'll admit that I had no idea any of these women existed. Histories of of early computing and the internet are a favorite of mine, but I usually begin further along in the story, with more user-friendly machines like the PDP-10 and the advent of networks. I was a little leery of the book given the asinine blurb on the back -- "alpha nerds and brogrammers"?  Really?  Thankfully, the funny title brought me, and glad I am because I never heard of these women...and some of them are really worth knowing.   Grace Hopper, for instance, was deeply involved in the Harvard Mark-1 and the UNIVAC, and she pionered the use of subroutines to speed up coding, as well as created the first compilers.    COBOL, which at one time was the language of 80% of existing code,  was based on her work.  A woman once refused admittance to the services during World War 2 because of her age would become a Rear Admiral before her life's computing work was done. Another remarkable subject here is Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler,  whose Network Information Office created and maintained a directory of...the internet.  Working for the still-nascent ARPANet, Feinler was the master of all information about it. Her team also created many basic protocols, both under-the-hood things most users wouldn't recognize as well as creating the original web extension: ".com".   The women who follow were also trail-blazers, experimenting with social networks (New York's "ECHO" bbs,  which could boast a  40% female population), as well as digital magazines distributed on floppy disks.  Surprisingly, ECHO is still around, though other projects like Word magazine are long gone. 

Broad Band effectively mixes biography and tech history, and the goal from the start doesn't overshadow the actual content.  That is,   most of the subjects should be included in histories of web regardless of their sex, given their importance. I say most because I'm not sure about the website creators of the nineties; I don't know enough about the web at that transitional moment to read Broad Band in context.  There were some claims that seemed specious, like references to Al Gore being the key player in making the internet a thing known to the public, and  there's a huge discrepancy in the estimate given for ECHO membership. Evans says it peaked at 40,000, while The Atlantic marks the peak as...2,000.  There's no way of knowing which is more accurate,  but given that it was only accessible via a paid membership,  I'm tempted to think Evans' is closer -- she interviewed the ECHO host herself.   The meat of the book seems to get leaner and leaner as it wears on, until at the end we're reading about how computers are couched in "masculine" language like..."crash" and "execute".    Despite the late-game weaknesses, there's a lot of fun information here about how the web as we know it evolved.

Tubes

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
© 2012 Andrew Blum
303 pages

It turns out Ted Stevens was right: the Internet really is a series of tubes, connecting large boxes, and usually in nondescript warehouses that look like self-storage units.  Inspired by a squirrel depriving him of Internet by nibbling on his wires, Andrew Blum decided to investigate the physical infrastructure of the Internet.  The journey took him across the United States and into Germany and Britain, where he discovered that the internet is corporeal. Across the world are businesses devoted solely to housing space where regional networks can directly tie into one another.  Tubes gives a slight sense for how the internet developed, visiting the university where the first connections were made, and then the first commercial network center.  However ethereal the internet may seem to regular users -- a mysterious force that binds and penetrates our computer?  -- it is given life by not just the creative energy poured into it, but the physical substructure -- routers, wires, warehouses, tubes, and cables.  It's awe-inspiring to think that there are companies whose physical property literally wraps around the world, providing redundant connections in case of an earthquake, although after reading it I'm still a foggy how on all this is done. How do routers know where to send information?   At some level, even the people running the networks aren't fully aware of their mechanics because there's so much information to channel. When it comes to data storage, for instance, different bits of a given video could be posted in multiple data centers. It's rather like the hydro engineers in On the Grid not being able to tell exactly how water got to a specific neighborhood; there are too many possible paths   Blum's goal of visiting 'monuments' of the internet, some of the most pivotal spots --  Google's data centers, treated with Area 51-type secrecy, the point where the first cable connected New York  and London, the aforementioned networking warehouses --- provides general milestones, but they're disjointed.  If you're really into the internet and its history, it makes for mildly entertaining reading, but the pieces remain disconnected.

War, spam, and more war

Today I finished Spam Nation, a journalistic takedown of the spam industry which is centered in Russia. The book is a strange collection of memoir and journalism on criminal relationships so entangled that I felt like I was reading about the securities market. There's a fascinating chapter on who actually buys products that are advertised via spam (mostly medicine that's illegal in Europe or too expensive in the US) and how that market compares to legitimate ones, though most of the book is about two Russian  cybercriminals who dominate the arena, whose infighting over turf exposes their dirty laundry and allows the police and other interests to take them on.  It doesn't read as neatly as @ War, but it does shed light on a murky corner of the internet. Essentially, these men use viral programs to coopt other people's computers to send billions and billions of spam messages,  chiefly marketing black market drugs and porn but also launching  other revenue-boosters like scareware, programs that hijack a computer, announce computer infection and bid the victim to buy their security program to get rid of it. I've been on the receiving side of those when trying to fix relatives' computers: they are not fun at all.  (Some disable any executable, including viral protection.)   The book is interesting, though not entirely impressive;  surely these two don't account for all spam, given how much 'real' advertising is done by email these days.  The title is ambitious.

My library is currently packing up some nonfiction books to send to a newly-created rural sister library,  and a lot of books I've kinda-sorta wanted to read but haven't gotten around to because I figured they would be there when I wanted to are on the list.  Trying to read them before they disappear is why I picked up Miracle at Dunkirk a few weeks ago and got into this World War 2 reading kick.

Earlier in the week I read Operation Compass 1940, a short work (80~  pages) on the early war in northern Africa, in which Italian troops set on seizing Egypt were savaged by a far smaller British force on the counteroffensive. The work was strictly military history, with good maps but a fairly narrow scope, focusing just on this particular battle.  The Italian humiliation here seems have prompted the Germans to take Africa more seriously as a campaign ground, so I'm following it with The Desert Foxes by Paul Carell.  It's a strange work, very sentimental and war-smitten. I looked up the author to see if he'd written anything else, and it turns out he's an honest-to-God-Nazi.  Oops. I'm still trying to find out how bad an apple he was.

The World War 2 reading will continue for the time being, though I intend on mixing other subjects in.  For instance, I have an interlibrary loan book on order about a band of Irish immigrants who fought in the US-Mexican war...for Mexico!  Another book on the way involves....horses.  As far as the 2015 Reading Challenge goes, once I take down A Classic Romance, that will be it. I have the Christmas read already purchased, and it's a quickie. (Tease: it's about Jacob Marley.)  My book with antonyms was That Was Then, This is Now. If I didn't have a mound of books on the Great War, World War 2, and cities, plus four books in the mail, I might be tempted to re-read everything Hinton.  I still may.   My self-control regarding books is on the anemic side. I know the stories, I just want to encounter the writing again.

“Your mother is not crazy. Neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made the perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do."

(Rumble Fish, S.E. Hinton)