Could the benefits of the Information Age include enhancing diplomacy in one of the worlds riskiest regions?
The founder of a new electronic research community gives an inside view of its conception and potentials By GARY G. SICK THE COMPUTER has gone through several metamorphoses since all of us began to make room for it on our desktops more than a decade ago. First it was a nimble and versatile typewriter, then a hefty number cruncher, and now it is becoming the ultimate communications device, connected by modem and telephone lines to an amorphous global network called the Internet. I eagerly invested in one of the earliest personal computers, a quaint little machine that I now realize was the research equivalent of training wheels. I also bought a modem when such devices were little more than clumsy novelties and dutifully plugged into a telephone jack, only to discover there was little of any significance on the other end of the line. Many things have changed. My three computers are now swifter and more capacious than I could have imagined in 1982. My modems are smaller, faster, and far m
