I found a two part article, from PennState's Academic Computing Newsletter back in '98, which is a sprint through telecommunications history from the telegraph to the Internet. The concept of laying a single giant cable across the Atlantic is still somewhat beyond me.
At first, it was simple. There was point A, this side of the atlantic, and point B, over the water. There were no offshoots and there was a tight limit on how many communications could be carried across it. It is interesting to look through the kind of telecommunications mapping that follows. The middle two maps are of the National Science Foundation Network's (NSFNet) major routers, supercomputing centers, and network backbones of the internet in the US in 1987. The last two images are screen shots from "chat circles," a project out of MIT's Sociable Media Group which is a chat room that visualizes the dynamics of a conversation: who is talking most frequently with whom, who is carrying or dominating the conversation, or idling in the background. With our ability to transmit and track more data, we have zoomed in on a smaller range of communication: the center maps are still grounded somewhat in hardware and geography, but the last delve into the very substance of a single conversation, now devoid of even abstracted geography.
The Internet Mapping Project < http://www.kk.org/internet-mapping/ > is compiling a collection of individual's hand drawn, "own experience of the Internet" maps.
In fact, to follow: my own Internet map.
Images:
< http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/internet_history_80s.html >
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable >
< http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/projects/chatcircles/ >
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