I first encountered computers in 1966 in the University of Manchester as a raw graduate student, embarking on my research into the application of systems methods to urban design. Design methods and computers - that says it all. In the 1960s, we had the arrogance and naivety to assume that we could automate design, but this was no more nor less than the widespread presumption that society itself could be understood by translating paradigms from physics into the social domain. Computers were part and parcel of this quest. Quantification and computation were synonymous and the way forward was based simulating through computing. Then Computers were all about numbers.

It took a long time for this association between computers and numbers to change and of course in a sense it is still at the basis of all computation. But in the 1960s, we did not anticipate the power of the great theoretical insight of Turing and von Neumann that computers were universal machines, that if you could reduce everything to some binary representation - on/off - black/white - yes/no - true/false - then you could compute it. There was just a sense that computation went beyond number crunching, and although the idea that pictures and words might be represented by computers had been around for a long time, there had been little progress. To all extents and purposes, these were closed worlds.

No one really anticipated that computers and their processors could be miniaturized almost indefinitely, nor could they see the extent to which computer memories would explode and processing times reduce. It was all there in the 1960s but like all great ideas, the implications were barely realized. Since then scientific computing has become a smaller and smaller part of computation, or rather, the computation of other media such as words and pictures has become so much more significant so that it now dominates.

The other unforeseen development is the convergence of computers with communications. From the beginning, computers were accessed remotely but only in the 1960s did this access begin to spill out over wider distances. I remember traveling on my first trip to America in 1970 to meet the gurus of urban modeling, meeting Jay Forrester who in his book Urban Dynamics (MIT Press, 1969) recounted that he had been able to do all the computer processing on his dynamic urban simulation from a terminal installed in his house which was online to MIT ! This was amazing. I distinctly remember thinking that this would never happen outside of the confines of a place like MIT but here I am typing this into WordPerfect on a Mac from my flat near St. Paul's cathedral in the City (of London), about to email it to my office and to Andy Smith who runs Online Planning so that he can get it up and running tomorrow when he launches the page. Amazing one would surely have said then in 1970. Not unusual now. Everywhere tomorrow.

The 1970s and 1980s saw the beginnings of this convergence. Terminals appeared in remote locations enabling access over a distance to computers, computers began to take on the appearance of serving remote machines which acted as clients, ethernets were invented at Xerox Parc, and rudimentary wide area networks such as DARPANet - the forerunner of the Internet - were established. In the early 1990s, remote access was widespread enough to consider that this would be the norm in the near future, but precisely how one would access remotely was still unclear. I wrote a paper with Bob Barr in 1993 called 'The Electronic Frontier: Exploring and Mapping Cyberspace' (subsequently published in Futures, 26, 699-712, 1994). But remarkably looking back just four years, there was no mention of the World Wide Web in the paper but this has become the de facto medium for communicating between remote computers in the last 3 years.

In fact, the last piece of the jigsaw to be put in place at this point in time, that is, (and a the current rate of change, it will all be unrecognizable again by the year 2020), was the computation of pictures rather than words across networks. This led to the World Wide Web which has become the dominant way of communication. Online Planning would not exits without the web. In the years B. W. (before the web), communication was through bulletin boards, through email and through file transfer, but the way we communicate best is through pictures. All of the contributions to this inaugural issue of Online Planning depend upon the web, they depend on browsing text through a pictorial interface which makes the communication easier. In fact all the papers deal with subjects which depend upon the existence of the web as something on top of the net as one might expect in these early days.

Let me take one step back to show you how far we have come. Had you asked me in the 1960s to envisage this situation 30 years on I simply could not have. I would have been wide of the mark. But had you asked me in 1987 to envisage this I could not have. Then I had retrained myself in computer graphics on a personal computer, but I was still largely doing mainframe computing for modelling and although word processing was being widely used in my office, I personally was not yet using it. And I had not heard of email. BITNET had only just been established and by and large, there was no network computing. The idea of putting papers, pictures, and information that one could see on billboards, on TV, and in newspapers onto the net was quite alien. In 1991, ftp and telnet were ways to communicate across machines but only to drag files and read email. Some remote computing could be done of course but this was painful. In 1994, in the summer, we were talking about the web having become conversant in the preceding year with Gopher and Archie and all the other net-based software which could retrieve information. But only in the fall of 1994 did I actually see the web, and as soon as it was there, we all felt as though it had been there forever. However could we have ever done without it.

The story from then on is well-known - it is history as they would say. But it is the content of what is being communicated which is most important. Information, computable in part of course, is the main purpose of such web-based communication at present. In these articles in this first issue of Online Planning, the web is everywhere in the content as one might expect. The Georgia Tech group through Dharm Guruswamy do a great job in showing us how to build a web site about planning itself and there is much about the content of planning here. William George Paul tells us about how to do design in Minnesota through the concept of the virtual design studio, while Alan Reeve and his colleagues show us how the Resource for Urban Design Information (RUDI) has been set up on the web and related media to serve urban designers with pertinent archival information. Taking networked computing into the community is Simon Hall's topic and taking it into local economic development is Alan Southern's quest. All these depend upon the net, yet at the end of the day, it is the content that it most important. David Cadman and Simin Davoudi remind us if this directly in their survey of planning skills where problem solving comes out as the key requirement.

The net, the web and the computability which goes with such communication as well as the ability to process varied media such as words, pictures and numbers - so far - are central to such problem solving. Online Planning will continue to bring you such ideas at the leading edge. Watch this space. Place your bookmark at our homepage !

Michael Batty is Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London.