The networked computer acts like a telephone in offering one-to-one real-time communication, like a television in broadcasting moving pictures, like an auditorium in bringing groups together for lectures and discussions, like a library in offering vast amounts of textual information for reference, like a museum in its ordered presentation of visual information, like a billboard, a radio, a game board, and even like a manuscript in its revival of scrolling text. All the major representational formats of the previous five thousand years of human history have now been translated into digital form.