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Information Technology for Development

Abstract

Sitting in a Land-Rover, north of the capital of Swaziland, remote from people, housing and transport, we were on line to the world. At the same moment we were:

  • Reading a screen of information on a rare disease after calling from our workstation to the BRS Colleague database in Seattle, Washington 
  • Printing data from a Prestel database located in Hong Kong 
  • Receiving an electronic mail message from Reading, England 
  • Answering the telephone from London

It was a magic moment. What were we doing? Why were we there? Well, it goes back a long way—to 1980 when CAP first produced an idea for maritime transport. In those days only crude microcomputers were available. We proved then that mobility was no block to the uses of information technology.

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