This growth has been sustained for the last 25 years and should continue until some physical limits are reached, which should not be the case in the near future. And this in turn would open new mind boggling possibilities for the machinery of the Information Society. Advances in Interconnecting Networks and Parallel Computing will result in ever more powerful workstations and compute servers up to the Teraflops range at affordable prices. Processor diversity is down to six architectures with minimal conceptual differences. Internet, the Web and the information explosion Globalization of data acquisition, storage, access and processing has been made possible by the growth of the internet and the facilities offered by the Web.
Research creates knowledge which has to be extracted from large volumes of data.
The challenge is to find those few meaningful bits. Web shortcomings, bandwidth, security, software and database proliferation are creating problems to first generation web-based researchers. We have basic tools to start building the Information Society. The Web and the internet are changing the World. But some improvements are now urgently needed.