] As with most miracles, the functional elimination of
] distance became invisible to us almost as soon as it
] happened. The planet shrank by several orders of
] magnitude and most of us adapted at once. But I had an
] experience - or rather, two experiences - the night I
] arrived from London which made it seem that the earth had
] shrunk to a point of global intimacy. Indeed, they felt
] like that first mystical moment the Internet provided me
] many years ago, when I realized that I could type
] "telnet" at a terminal prompt and cause any number of
] hard disks to spin all over the world.