Personal correspondents will be pleased to learn that I recently finished reading Cryptonomicon, and will begin to mention it less frequently. This time I was reading the Kindle version, purchased on a lark to see if I could get the author to sign it.

My paperback is on loan, and I am glad of the shelf space it freed up. It is wide enough to print the title horizontally on the spine.

One of the points in the Kindle-vs-paper debates is the "feel" of a physical object in your hands. I have become comfortable with plastic rectangles, but they do have their downsides. I was chugging along, approaching the novel's grand denouement, when it suddenly ended, the progress bar showing 87%. It felt kind of like one of those web articles where a big chunk of the page is composed of comments.

Turns out the Kindle edition had this article, Stephenson's remarkable investigation into undersea cables, as an appendix. This is a goodlongread, though it may be stretching the limits of that tag as it weighs in at over 40,000 words. Sadly, the original photos are not included, and I recall there were some good ones in what must have been an unusually thick edition of the magazine. All I can find now is the cover, which I believe I have seen used as an author shot elsewhere.

But we have gained more than we have lost since this was published in December 1996. The story is about the construction of FLAG, the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, which was built as the Internet was coming into its own.

It is natural, then, to ask what effect FLAG is going to have on the latest and greatest cable hack: the Internet. Or perhaps it's better to ask whether the Internet affected FLAG. The explosion of the Web happened after FLAG was planned. Taketo Furuhata, president and CEO of IDC, which runs the Miura station, says: "I don't know whether Nynex management foresaw the burst of demand related to the Internet a few years ago - I don't think so. Nobody - not even AT&T people - foresaw this. But the demand for Internet transmission is so huge that FLAG will certainly become a very important pipe to transmit such requirements."

Stephenson carried a newfangled GPS receiver and included coordinates of the exotic sites mentioned in the article. These are now handy references for Google Maps, allowing you to drop in and have a look around.

Here are a couple more passages to serve as appetizers.

The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes. He achieved a level of pure accomplishment in this field that the Alfonse D'Amatos of our time can only dream of. The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer. In any case, Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse fancied himself something of an expert on electricity. His rival was William Thomson, 10 years younger, a professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow University who was infatuated with Fourier analysis, a new and extremely powerful tool that happened to be perfectly suited to the problem of how to send electrical pulses down long submarine cables.

The rivalry has a pleasing ending; Thomson became Lord Kelvin, hailed as a hero to sailors and given a unit of measure named in his honor.

By a freak of geography and global politics, Egypt possesses the same sort of choke point on Europe-to-Asia telecommunications as the Suez canal gives it in the shipping industry. Anyone who wants to run a cable from Europe to East Asia has severely limited choices. You can go south around Africa, but it's much too far. You can go overland across all of Russia, as US West has recently talked about doing, but if even a 170-kilometers terrestrial route across Thailand gets your customers fumbling for their smelling salts, what will they say about one all the way across Russia? You could attempt a shorter terrestrial route from the Levant to the Indian Ocean, but given the countries it would have to pass through (Lebanon and Iraq, to name two), it would have about as much chance of survival as a strand of gossamer stretched across a kick-boxing ring. And you can't lay a cable down the Suez Canal, partly because it would catch hell from anchors and dredgers, and partly because cable-laying ships move very slowly and would create an enormous traffic jam.