How did the invention of computers and the internet connect the whole world?
The Whispering Planet
How did the invention of computers and the internet connect the whole world?
Once, the world was enormous. A message from one side of it to the other could take weeks, bouncing along on horseback, on ships, on tired human legs. Then we built a machine that could think in lightning, and stitched those machines together — and suddenly the whole planet started whispering to itself.
It started with the computer, which is really just a very fast, very obedient pebble. We learned to slice a stone called silicon into chips, and to trick it into flipping millions of tiny switches on and off. On and off, yes and no — that simple stutter is all a computer does. It just does it billions of times a second, which turns out to be enough to do almost anything.
