We are in the middle of a revolution -- an information revolution. All one has to do to realise this is merely look around. The world is linked by a computer network that just 10 years ago was almost unimaginable. There is e-mail, and of course, World Wide Web access. The latest statistics show more than 108 million people worldwide have access to the Web. There are some 1.9 million homepages that enable shopping, reading of the daily news andthe ability to search for an almost endless amount of information.' All this is done from the convenience of a personal computer (PC) on a desktop.