Mother Earth Mother Board (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Mother Earth Mother Board (1996)

wired.com

60 pointsthunderbong21 comments

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Rightfully a HN perennial submission, though with surprisingly little discussion. Previous posts with conversation:

4 years ago -- 20 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635028

3 years ago -- 23 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20497098

8 years ago -- 15 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7542326n

13 years ago -- 9 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634929

On one of those previous discussions someone recommended Arthur C. Clarke's "How the World was One" as a companion piece if the subject material is interesting to you. It's long out of print at this point but well worth seeking out a copy for a fascinating history of early telecommunications.

3rd URL is broken. You have an extra `n` on the end. It should be:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7542326

Gah! Thanks.

Relevant is an observation from his editor for this piece, who was in the audience for his Fall, or Dodge in Hell talk at The Long Now Foundation, responding to an earlier questioner about his editing process [1]:

I just wanted one quick comment, then a question, but when you ask this question about his writing style I will tell you: I was working under Kevin at Wired when Neil did a story of following the fiber-optic cable around the world, and it was a forty five thousand word piece, and I will say when you brought the copy in I could not improve it. As an editor his was the cleanest copy I'd ever worked with, ever, with any other writer, and I actually worked with a lot of writers. So I will say you have something going on there about your first drafts that are uneditable.

[1] https://youtu.be/bkxuzwCps70?t=2042

That's funny, because Fall desperately needed an editor. I barely managed to finish it. The "real life" plot lines were mostly enjoyable, the "virtual world" stuff was just interminably tedious

It gets better on subsequent reads but it's not the easiest thing to get into indeed. The first time I read it, I found the virtual world stuff annoying and hard to understand. But it grew on me on the re-read since I knew what he was trying to do and because with Neal Stephenson it's always about the details and little side plots and not about moving the main plot forward.

I had the same experience with the Baroque cycle on first read. I've since re-read that many times and I'm already looking forward to picking up Fall and Termination Shock for more re-reads in a few years.

De gustibus non est disputandum. I liked the virtual world stuff.

I kept that issue of Wired. Later I heard somewhere that this issue was the single most expensive magazine issue in history.

The article is dated December 1996.

I have yet to look through the previous HN submissions, does anyone know if there is an online scan of the original? The photography and art direction are magnificent, and what's an epic travelogue without photos?

Sadly, although the Internet Archive has several of that year's Wired issues scanned, they do not appear to have December.

You can read it in a collection of his writings (https://archive.org/details/someremarksessay00step/page/120/...) but that's not much different (and less accessible) than the link on this post.

Unfortunately, for any of us that own that edition I assume it's illegal to post a scan but I did find a picture of the cover of that issue at amazon so you can at least see the Morse code "get wired" he mentions in the article: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51RnGdSp4eL...

I dunno, the Internet Archive has no problem hosting other issues from the same year

The Hacker Tourist Travels the World To Bring Back

The Epic Story of Wiring the Planet

- what an epic headline

holy hell. I have a garbage bag full of wireds from the 90s in my basement that I was looking for somewhere to recycle. Time to go on an archaeology expedition...

I found my copy. It's about 3x as thick as any other WIRED, and more than 25% of it is just that one article! It's timely, too... I just reread Cryptonomicon last year. I don't want to break the spine to scan it ;)

$4.95 / Canada $5.95. Amazing.

Second headline on the cover is "AOL: A-OK or DOA?"

Third headline: "FedEx: Airline of the Internet", which probably deserves its own HN post...

When I read Cryptonomicon I figured this was what gave him the idea for Epiphyte(2).

Was this written by the Neal Stephenson, famous sci-fi author?

Yep.

Stephenson is pretty influential as an essayist and general concepts guy. One time even William Gibson cited him, specifically the "burbclave" idea from Snow Crash, in his essay "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" about Singapore. Which is pretty much... the literary equivalent of when a band plays the "Weird Al" parody version of their song.

Yes indeed!

And it’s just as good as you would assume, and then some.

Long haul fiber optic stuff has gotten a lot fancier as far as the modems at either end are concerned (the fibers too, to a lesser extent) but the basic culture of laying and maintaining cable is pretty much the same.

One thing that is great, since this article came out is that you can be an armchair "hacker tourist". That historic cable landing in Porthcurno, for example? Photo easily found.

https://atlantic-cable.com/CableCos/Porthcurno/PorthcurnoCab...

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