BarryGrussling.com

I imagine by now that many people have heard of the "Series of Tubes" metaphor used by Ted Stevens to describe the internet. I am amazed at how much publicity this comment has received, and also amazed at the outcry that many technical oriented people have had.

I deal a fair amount in TCP traffic at work, and am often running ethereal (wireshark) and debugging communications problems. While I would not necessary say that the internet is a series of tubes, I don't see any problems with the metaphor. After the SYN->SYN,ACK->ACK handshake is done, a connection is established. If you want to treat that connection as a "tube", I don't see a problem with it.

Lets further muddy the water by introducing netcat into the picture. If you run "ps aux | grep Xorg | grep -v grep", you are creating a series of stdout->stdin relationships. In Unix terminology, we call these "pipes". If you run a command such as "tar -cf - /etc/ | nc -w 3 1234", you are piping the output of tar over the network to . I would say this is a network pipe, and the simularity between a pipe and a tube is quite high.

In summary, if I was trying to explain TCP to my grandmother, I would most likely call the connection between two computers a pipe. I don't see a problem with this, and I think the media is over-reacting.

Thank goodness he didn't call the internet a series of cans connected via string!