Hey, you, young eager student. Or you, the not-so-young person who is perhaps not even a student and who might be a bit jaded and tired. Would you like to get out into the world, to meet new people and to gain new ideas? To travel, to move from one place to another and to learn how people live in other places?

So would I.

There are other ways of travelling from Finland than flying on Finnair's Blue Wings or taking the railway to Europe. Cheaper and faster way. Even directly from your own home. Via the Internet.

For some, it is a way of gaining new information. For others, it is a means to discuss with people they would not otherwise be able to meet. Some are afraid of the borderlessness of the Internet; others will never be able to quite get it. I personally found new areas of interest, new acquaintances, new ways of thinking, and a new job.

You might start using the Internet quite timidly, as I did, by e-mailing your friends. But real interest is ignited only when you start to get acquainted with your new lectronic world, a world where it takes the same amount of time to send a message to someone on the other side of the globe and receive an answer as it takes to send it to someone in your own town.

You will meet new people who might share your hobbies. You will find that even though electronic communication presents its own small problems, you can even try to let your feelings show by using tiny little funny images consisting of ASCII signs. And sometimes you will be suprised by how much felling some people dare to reveal to complete strangers ;-)

I got acquainted with people who were interested in what I was doing, and thus they made my project much more interesting. The Linux system, used by millions, grew out of a small operating system intented for personal use.

What could you create using the Internet?

Linus Torvalds Santa Clara Kalifornia 22.7.1998