Undersea Cables by Rishi Sunak [PDF]
Years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak wrote this report, Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure.
Link tags: communications
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PAST Visions of the Future - Future of Interfaces
Video visions of aspirational futures made from the 1950s to the 2010s, mostly by white dudes with bullshit jobs.
Age of Invention: The Beacons are Lit!
Or, Why wasn’t the Telegraph Invented Earlier?
A wonderful deep-dive into optical telegraphy through the ages.
How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine
Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.
General Magic
A forthcoming documentary about the company spun out of Apple to create a handheld communication device …in 1990.
From mobile computing, social media, downloadable apps and e-commerce to touchscreens, emoji and USB, the products and services that now dominate the tech industry and our day-to-day lives were born at General Magic.
Brief History of the Internet - Internet Timeline | Internet Society
From twenty years ago, a look back at the origins of the internet, written by its creators.
Urban Giants on Vimeo
A look at the architectural history of the network hubs of New York: 32 Avenue of the Americas and 60 Hudson Street. Directed by Davina Pardo and written by her husband Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet.
These buildings were always used as network hubs. It’s just that the old networks were used to house the infrastructure of telephone networks (these were the long line buildings).
In a way, the big server hotel of New York—111 Eight Avenue—was also always used to route packets …it’s just that the packets used to be physical.
Inflatable Tower Promises Easy Access to Outer Space: Discovery News
An alternative to the space elevator, an inflatable tower nine miles tall and tethered to a mountain top, could be made of commercially available materials.