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INTRODUCTORY NOTE
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This issue is about global perspectives, a topic which our contributors are well familiar with. For them, "the Global Village" is more than a cliche. They live in it.

The articles may not seem to concern themselves with the future, but they do. The personal perspectives of our authors give a cross section of some of the things happening right now, and which are shaping our lives. We are facing a global revolution which will change the face of politics, business, eduaction forever. Read on and be prepared.

Odd de Presno

CONTRIBUTORS

ODD DE PRESNO, guest editor, is an independent author, journalist
consultant, and modem globetrotter living in Norway. He has been
involved with international communication for 16 years, and has written
extensively about the subject. He is the Project Director of the global
KIDS-91 project.

DAVE HUGHES, as the Cursor Cowboy, had been riding the electronic range
for over 10 years. Both using, and creating online systems which have
reached from Russia to China, one-room school houses in Montana, to
Banks in France. Currently he is the SEWAYAKU -or Sysop - of NHK
Japanese Television's Ginganet - from Colorado, is teaching Indians how
to do original art in telecommunicated Naplps, while building a Western
Saddle complete with an LCD in the horn and packet radio in the saddle
bags, and linking MIT with school kids by modem to learn Chaos
mathematics.

EDUARDO SALOM, in 1967, at his first job as Industrial Engineer started
to work with computers to get rid of an awfully repetitive calculation
job his boss assigned him to do. Now president of SoftWare Plus SA, a
software house based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he is mostly dedicated
to industrial applications and datacommunication. He discovered the
networks in 1988, and has since then been obsessed by the changes that
networking might introduce in the global society.

MARY LOU REBELO was born in Southern Brazil, lived for many years in Rio
de Janeiro. She moved next to Belgium and then back to Brazil, to
Manaus, in the Amazon State. Now she lives in Tokyo, Japan, where she
teaches Portuguese and does translations for living.

NANCY STEFANIK is a public interest computer networking specialist based
in Washington, DC. Her job at the Advocacy Institute is to explore how
computer networking can be used to enhance public interest advocacy
efforts; one "laboratory" is ACS GLOBALink, which was developed to
enable the tobacco control movement to match the global reach of the
tobacco industry for the first time.

JOHN S. QUARTERMAN lives in Texas, and is the author of, THE MATRIX, the
landmark book of the telecommunication world. He is a founder, with
Smoot Carl-Mitchell, of Texas Internet Consulting of Austin, a firm
specializing in networking and in UNIX standards and programming. He has
served on the USENIX Board of Directors since 1986.