Publisher:
Microsoft PressThis is a sad story, but one that needs telling.You might wonder what this book
is doing among the rest of mine, since I'm not listed as the author. The fact is
that although I wasn't responsible for the entire book and wouldn't have accepted
cover credit had it been offered, I and a friend of mine, Steve Manes, actually wrote
a great deal of this book.
Cary Lu was a technology writer who lived near Seattle, and over the years I've lived
in the area, we'd become friends. In fact, we'd become fairly close friends, and
it was devastating in January of 1997 when he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
They never even figured out where it had started, and despite radiation treatments
and chemotherapy, Cary died in September of 1997.
He left behind a wife, two young children, and an unfinished book about bandwidth.
Steve Manes, who then wrote for the New York Times
and now writes for Forbes, and I had offered
to finish Cary's book for him, something he'd resisted at first, since it was something
he could cling to - he wouldn't give up until he had finished. Unfortunately, the
cancer was too strong for him, and even he finally admitted that he would need our
help in finishing.
Several months after Cary's death, Steve and I sat down with Cary's files, notes
we'd taken from talking to him, and piles of research he had accumulated. If Cary
had been working on it, the book might have been 75 percent done. Since we had to
start from scratch on many of the topics, it was probably only about half done. I
learned more about topics like digital satellite radio than I ever thought I'd know.
Between us, Steve and I wrote and edited and filled in all the gaps in Cary's existing
text, and then we added several chapters that Cary had planned, reorganized the entire
book, and finally managed to get it out the door, complete with a moving introduction
from Cary's wife Ellen.
Since I'm not the author, and since Microsoft Press doesn't generally stay in touch
for other reason, I don't know how well this book has sold, but it's an excellent
introduction to the concepts behind bandwidth. Most treatises on the topic concentrate
on telecommunications, but Cary's breadth of knowledge enabled him to cover all forms
of bandwidth, including audio, video, and point-to-point. He even included a short
history of bandwidth and a discussion of the highest bandwidth medium currently available
(a cargo ship crammed to the gills with CD-ROMs).
Most people equate speed with bandwidth, but bandwidth is in fact the measurement
of the amount of information you can transfer over time, so a slow medium is fine
if it can transfer a heck of a lot of information. It's a useful lesson to keep in
mind - sometimes it does makes sense to use FedEx instead of email.