On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed. This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted. Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason. The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching- station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after station across America collapsed in a chain reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow. Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear. The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software -- not the sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of increasing competition. Still, the truth was told, in the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it. Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security personnel. These people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster. The police and telco security had important sources of information denied to mere software engineers. They had informants in the computer underground and years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. For years they had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the American national telephone system. And with the Crash of January 15 -- the first month of a new, high-tech decade -- their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last to have entered the real world. A world where the telephone system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, been crashed -- by "hackers."
funnyhair: be sure to pick up The Silmarillion once you finish the LOTR. For me it was even better than the original trilogy. Children of Hurin was also surprisingly good. Christopher Tolkien is very faithful to his father's writing style. I'm sure most of you have at least heard about The Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, so I'll just say that yes, it does live up to the hype. The series has been going a little downhill with the last two books but they're still great and definitely worth your time. About American Gods: meh, it was OK. The premise is great but the book is just too long. Nothing Gaiman has done has gotten even close to the awesomeness and ingenuity of the Sandman graphic novels. Check them out if you haven't already.
I very much agree with this post.
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
funnyhair: be sure to pick up The Silmarillion once you finish the LOTR. For me it was even better than the original trilogy. Children of Hurin was also surprisingly good. Christopher Tolkien is very faithful to his father's writing style.
Has nobody mentioned Dune simply because it's assumed everyone has read it already?
I read Dune a while back, It was long an difficult but a well written novel. The problem with dune is that people assume its the best thing ever written in terms of Sci-fi. While I would not hesitate to put it on a top ten list, I would certainly would not put it in number one. The problem with dune, is that it is related to the ten- thousand sequels that follow, and I am surprised anyone still reads that crap. I once heard from a friend not to read past the third book, he had read six. I still think it is a good suggestion though and I am surprised no one else had read it.
I very much agree with this post.
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
I don't think there is anyone who seriously considers "Dune" the best sci-fi book ever. Rather, it's rightly considered a high masterpiece because it essentially created the modern sci-fi genre. In terms of pioneering sci-fi works, "Frankenstein" is the only thing higher than it.
