Fun fact: The first transatlantic internet cable is being pulled off the ocean floor right now.

Almost no one knows it's happening.

TAT-8 went live in 1988. First fiber-optic cable to connect Europe and the US.

Isaac Asimov called it a "maiden voyage across the sea on a beam… pic.twitter.com/8ALwcPLkke

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) 10 mars 2026

Fun fact: The first transatlantic internet cable is being pulled off the ocean floor right now. Almost no one knows it's happening. TAT-8 went live in 1988. First fiber-optic cable to connect Europe and the US. Isaac Asimov called it a "maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light." The engineers behind it genuinely believed it might be the last transatlantic cable the world would ever need. The tech was so far ahead of copper they thought global bandwidth was solved. But it filled to capacity within 18 months. That forced the industry to immediately start laying more cables, a race between demand and infrastructure that still hasn't stopped. After developing a fault too expensive to fix, the cable was retired in 2002. It's been sitting on the seabed ever since. Now a small crew aboard this ship is dragging it back up. Meanwhile, Meta announced Project Waterworth last year, a 50,000 kilometer cable stretching across 5 continents, partly to feed the data demands of AI. …The entire global internet runs on cables like this, built and maintained by a few thousand people working in places most of us will never see.

→ View original post on X — @rowancheung, 2026-03-10 16:13 UTC