Digital crossroads

Information superhighways are the new connective conduits of a global society

- CODY CLARK

At the height of the ancient Roman empire, soldiers of the imperial legions, colonists, tradesman, farmers, citizens, and slaves all traveled to and fro across the numerous Roman provinces — from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the tip of the Persian Gulf, from the northernmost sands of the Sahara Desert to the thick forests of Caledonia (modern Scotland) — using carefully designed and precisely engineered roads.

The arteries of the empire included 29 military highways, 372 great roads, and numerous lesser routes stretching more than 250,000 miles across hills and mountains, rivers and ravines, marshes and woodlands. An entry in the Itinerary of Antoninus describes the sprawling system this way:

“There is hardly a district to which we might expect a Roman official to be sent, on service either civil or military, where we do not find roads. They reach the Wall in Britain; run along the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates; and cover, as with a network, the interior provinces of the Empire.“

“As with a network,” you say? We still have vast grids of roads in 2020, but many of the functions once served by foot traffic, oxcarts, and mule trains — commerce, communication, security — now happen much faster through the all-encompassing embrace of computer networks.

Like the massive network of stone-paved and well-drained road the Romans built, our modern networks still require careful planning and regular maintenance. The breadth and depth of what is possible using computer networking, however, is limited only by the scope of human knowledge, imagination, and resources. Even a network that transmits information wirelessly around the globe, of course, still requires infrastructure.