In North America, one could very easily get a distorted view of the rest of the world when it comes to internet access. in the USA and Canada, one can stay connected continually, without regard to cost. And the connections tend to be fast and convenient.

But this is not the case in most of the rest of the world. While there are some notable exceptions, Australia and Israel for example, many in the international microscopy and microanalysis community have to struggle with connections that are either very slow, or very expensive, or both, in fact, in many parts of the world, internet content is routinely not with the benefit of graphics. This is really a great disadvantage since, in many instances, the real important information is contained within the graphics. Even in the USA and Canada, because of firewall considerations or other concerns, a surprisingly large number of end users do not have internet access at their main workstations, and they have to suffer the inconvenience of using some kind of shared resource, either “down the hall” or worse yet, in another building.