@build.with.alan: Follow and Comment CABLE and I’ll send you the full story. 👇 1988. 6,000 kilometres. One beam of light across the Atlantic. 🌊 AT&T, British Telecom and France Telecom laid TAT-8 — the first fibre-optic cable ever run across an ocean floor. At the launch, Isaac Asimov spoke to audiences in Paris and London by video link from New York and called it “this maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light.” The engineers thought it might be the last transatlantic cable the world would ever need. They gave it ten years to fill. It filled in 18 months. It was retired in 2002 after a fault made it too expensive to repair — and it’s been sitting down there ever since. Now one of only three companies on the planet that recover subsea cable is dragging it back up off the coast of Portugal. Coiled by hand, because machines shatter the glass. Here’s the part that gets me. 95% of all traffic between continents runs through cables like this. Every message, every stream, every AI prompt you’ve ever sent travelled through glass threads thinner than a human hair, lying on the ocean floor. And roughly 2 million kilometres of dead cable is still down there, most of it never recovered. Meanwhile a new 50,000km cable across five continents is going in right now, built specifically to feed AI. The race that started in 1988 is only speeding up.

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