Keynote: It Really is a Series of Tubes
This keynote is now available to view on InfoQ.com
Watch video with transcriptAbstract
Senator Ted Stevens once described the Internet as a series of tubes—he was just off by a century. Pneumatic tubes, the ones that you know from banks and hospitals, used to run under the streets of every major financial center in the world, connected post and telegraph offices. Starting in the 1850s, booming in the 1880s and -90s, and in service as late as 1980s to early 2000s, pneumatic tubes made it possible to get a message across the city quickly. Paris had the biggest tube network in the world until 1984, going out of service only when fax and phone service became reliable enough. This talk goes in-depth to one of the largest information networks of its day and provides an interesting historical comparison to the development of modern digital networks - the challenges faced by constructing these networks, the limits of what could be sent through these networks and the impact they had on communication as a whole - and wonderful talk by Molly Wright Steenson goes right down the tubes.
