Edmund Carpenter (a colleague of Marshall McLuhan) once philosophized that, "Electricity makes angels of us all - not angels in the Sunday school sense... but spirit freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere."

I won't go so far as to ascribe celestial qualities to the Internet, but today's evolving Net technologies do indeed enable us to transcend some of the constraints of the physical world. What radio and television did for broadcast (one-to-many) communications, and the phone and fax have done for personal (one-to-one) communications, the Internet is now extending to multicast (many-to-many) communications - while at the same time subsuming some integral broadcasting and telephony applications.

When information travels across the globe as quickly and easily as it does across town, geography is no longer a barrier to communication. When that information remains available online for instantaneous access at any time of the day or night, this week or next month, then time ceases to be a limitation. When we can access information stored on a server in Glasgow or Gdansk at the same cost as data on a computer in our hometown, economics is not a constraint. And when we can freely visit thousands of Internet sites, and pick and choose the information we want to download and read, authoritarian control of information ceases to be a concern.

There are some intrinsic limitations to the Internet, to be sure: some technological, some cultural, and some personal. But as new technologies evolve, as the global infrastructure grows, and as use of the Internet becomes a common part of our daily lives, these limitations will grow less, and be less noticed. The Internet may not turn us into angels, but it does give us electronic wings with which to roam a vast new information and communications world.

In every endeavor there are certain key people who - by being in the right place at the right time, with the needed skills and spirit - make all the difference. I'd like to dedicate this third anniversary issue to two such people. To Chika: Your faith in the vision kept us going when it would have been easier to stop. And to Takako: You came when you were needed, and picked up the pieces so that we could put ourselves back together again. Computing Japan wouldn't be here today if you two hadn't been there then.

And most of all, I dedicate this and every issue to my wife Keiko. I couldn't have done it without you!

WM. Auckerman