Japanese Edition Vol.5

The season for cherry blossoms has already come and gone in Japan and the time is now "Golden Week," the period from late April to early May containing a welcome string of national holidays. While most people are enjoying their free time, we know that some of our members will stay in their laboratories and work as usual or harder than usual.

The secretariat of RWC has started preparations for RWC Symposium scheduled in December 1996. The Symposium is the first event to report to the public on the past achievements of the RWC Program since its inception in 1992. We look forward to your participation. A detailed notice will be available in June and delivered to all RWC members. Also, you can access the most-up-to-date information on the event at our Internet web page.

Our URL is: http://www.rwcp.or.jp/events/

Yasuhiro Kato and Noriko Namikoshi

Japanese Edition Vol.6

The Atlanta Olympics was the first attempt ever to report the event over the Internet. Not only the official WWW site operated by IBM, one of sponsors, but also many other sites by newspapers and sporting good manufacturers posted the results of the Games. Some providers updated their WWW pages three times a day.

It wasn't just a one-way service like TV nor time-consuming data retrieval by turning the pages of a newspaper or magazine. With a few clicks of a mouse, you could access whatever data you wanted.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, an Academy Award winning composer and a resident of New York, is said to read the Japanese newspapers every day on the Internet. The sounds of the newspaper boys' bicycle wheels in the morning and the smell of fresh newspaper ink may soon become things of the past. After several decades more, completely new forms of news delivery may be created and then even the clicking of the mouse early in the morning might become a thing of the past.

Noriko Namikoshi

Japanese Edition Vol.7

Just one or two years ago, URL was not a household term, but now you can spot at least a few URL every day. When you read a newspaper or magazine, or take a look at posters in the trains, you will inevitably find a URL. It's like saying "Hey, you don't have much information, do you? I'll tell you how and where to get information," URLs are everywhere we go. It is reported that there are about 50 million Web sites all over the world. Even in Japan alone, there are now some 1 million WWW sites.

I was surprised when my mother asked me about the meaning of the term "Internet" and a mysterious line of characters beginning with "http," because she still believes that even a fax machine is the work of the Devil. It was so impressive for me to find that these terms have obtained the status of "housewives' vocabulary."

I found an article in a weekly magazine that coined the term "PC refugees" to describe such middle-aged people who have bought PCs with their imperfect pieces of information and who telephone computer shops asking "where can I buy an Internet, because I can't find them in the shops."

Noriko Namikoshi