From the archive: May 17, 1996

And in a remarkably short time since the idea was first mooted in the office, my computer now has the world at its keyboard, and I am more knowledgeable about ferrets than I have ever been before. I have visited Legoland without leaving my desk, and I have dropped in on the homes of people I certainly do not want to meet in real life.

I am a little dismayed at how unreceptive to modern technology we are as a profession. At a meeting last summer, a gaggle of local solicitors (help now needed please on aggregating solicitors. Any improvements on a sojourn or a solecism on a post card please. Thanks for your suggestions about collections of barristers) revealed that almost none of them had really got into computers in a big way.

I do realise that I have to pick my words carefully these days. A report in The Times at the end of last year revealed that in one month more than 4,000 connections were made at Oxford University to an Internet erotic media group. When I talked about getting into computers I did not mean that.

The world is changing (again). Sometimes I subscribe to the view (expressed by some pensioners when we went over to decimal coinage) that 'they' should let the old ones die off before inflicting more innovation on the world.

But then we have all been blessed with the Chinese curse that we should live in interesting times, and I have to admit that I find the developments in technology exciting.

The Internet has been described as a huge leap for democracy, opening up unimagined possibilities of communication between human beings around the globe.

I am not convinced that the Internet will save the world. I am sure that prying governments could easily find a way of tuning into what we were all saying, especially as it is all in writing and could be sucked out of the system and used in evidence against us. My hope would be that boredom would set in long before MI5 reached my seditious remarks. Alternatively, at the rate that the Internet is growing, it would take half the population to keep up with what the other half was doing. Big Brother may be watching, but at least the unemployment problem would be solved.

The Internet already is proving to be a wonderful communication tool.

Perhaps I had better give a short lesson for the bewildered (from a recently ex-bewildered). The Internet is a huge sprawling computer information exchange. It appears to be owned by nobody and everybody. If you have a modem (a black box which connects the computer to a telephone line) and pay a modest monthly subscription to a service provider, you can bring the world to your back door and take your back door to the world. Using the search facilities (quaintly called search engines) you can home in on almost any subject which takes your fancy, all for the price of a local telephone call. In seconds you can be browsing documents held on computers in America, all Europe or even Russia. I am currently in touch with a Russian scientist via the Internet, but I won't name him in case it provokes further international tension.