Inside the Geekosystem

Most days you'll find Bill Cheswick in the print room at Bell Labs in New Jersey, awaiting the arrival of what seems to be a massive, digitized Jackson Pollock. His colleagues, he feels, are getting pretty weary of these 1-foot-square slabs of abstract art he keeps hauling around. "They say it looks like a peacock smashed on a windshield," says Cheswick. "I thought it looked like a coral sea fan."

Actually, it's neither, though the creature comparisons may be more appropriate than anyone thinks. Cheswick's color-splattered printout is a map of the entire Internet —] the networks and routers (the electronic equivalent of tin cans and string) that bind the digital age together. The senior researcher plans to make the maps commercially available and hopes teenage geeks everywhere will soon be pinning his posters next to Alanis Morrisette on their bedroom walls. MORE >>