Thanks for visiting our pages! We are glad to have your company. Please read below to know why I started 'The Surfer's Digest', and what all this place is going to be about...

When I punched for the first time... a computer keyboard, personal computers and even microprocessors were a fairly recent novelty. Like Bill Gates, I was starting to meddle with computer software, and though we have both succeeded, I must admit that our respective scales have been quite different (grin). But now I'm glad to remember those glorious days I've enjoyed, when 'top technology' was an 8 bit Z80 based CPU, 64K RAM and 128K floppies, no hard disk, of course.

When I saw my first article go into press, magazines were hard things to make. You needed a small army of writers, typists, proofreaders, art designers, photo-lab technicians, lot of labour hours and costly equipment... just to be able to knock the print shop door, where another different army would use paper and ink to produce (hopefully) thousands of copies of a given issue. Then, you had to work hard, very hard, to put those issues in the hands of your targeted readers.

Now, technology... has turned this scenario upside down. Computers are powerful and cheap, software is available everywhere for every conceivable application (including publishing, be it conventional or electronic), and communication networks enable us to reach instantly the most remote and unknown places in Planet Earth. Internet, in fact, has put the world a click away from our desks. On the publishing arena, just by having a computer, an Internet account, and a hosting server, anyone can start his/her own 'online magazine', with a potential readership that can be measured in a millonaire scale.

So, online publishing... is helping to make the free world, more free. It is helping us to discover new and exciting ways of publishing, also. Unlike printed pages, webpages can be modified or updated anytime in a snap, they can talk to the readers and show them images and videos, they can be used as a gateways to lots of similar sites, they can take us to New Zealand, Japan, Sri-Lanka or Argentina in a matter of seconds... unlike printed pages, webpages are 'dynamic'.

Experimenting with online publishing... is the underlying idea of 'The Surfer's Digest'. We will put our bests efforts to present the readers with interesting articles and information about everyday life in the Net: hardware and software tips and reviews, links to sites of interest, some essays on how to survive in the Global Village, and so on. Content will be 'tainted' by our own experiences and interests, so writings and information on distance education, MOOs (a type of text-based virtual reality) and cybercommunities will have a privileged treatment here.

I hope you'll enjoy... every page of 'The Surfer's Digest', and I expect you'll bookmark its URL to have this as one of your regular surfing sites, also. We are going to put a serious effort to make this online magazine grow, maybe slowly but steadily. As Tim Berners-Lee once said, 'the Web is what we make it'. And we are glad to have a chance to add our humble contribution to that end.