The U.S. Department of Defense needed a decentralized computer network in order to prevent total destruction of the American defense system after the first Russian atomic bomb hit an American target. With an account on the Internet you really have a special driveway leading from your personal computer to this gigantic electronic highway that reaches probably more than 25 million users all over the world -although at this moment most users are still American. But the rest of the world is catching on at great speed. Sometimes even on the electronic highway traffic is heavy, and during rush hours some connections get overloa- ded. Even there traffic jams seem inevitable.
Internet users have various possibilities to search and retrieve information.
Electronic mail, or e-mail as it is called, is the oldest and simplest form. Unfortunately these classic Internet tools are not user friendly, so new ones were invented. For journalists the Internet opens new ways to search through enormous amounts of information and at a much higher speed than the traditional methods of research provided. The computer networks enable the reporter to get the relevant information right into his database or spreadsheet. At first sight this electronic research doesn't seem to differ much from the traditional methods.