It is important to make it quite clear from the outset that this was not a digital revolution. The digital revolution had already gone on for some time. It was relatively continuous and primarily centred on computation. The Web was rather a multimedia revolution, and multimedia are not about computation. Multimedia are mostly about illusions-visual, auditive and other illusions created by computers.
Virtual reality is such an illusion.
In this short exposition it will be convenient to start with some simple, intuitive ideas. The Net can be seen as a material structure and the Web as the human minds interacting through the Net. The development of telecommunication technology started a long time ago. A qualitative jump happened when the first telegraph line was installed in 1838. 150 years and several qualitative jumps later the Web wave began showing.