A century ago snail mail was the most popular, and in many cases only, means of communication. The hand written letter, whether it was sent by post or delivered by some small boy desperate to earn a farthing, was how people chronicled their thoughts, issued invitations, paid condolences. It was a leisurely process and relatively efficient. In large towns the postman delivered several times a day. There were faster means of communication than the Pony Express. A man on fast horse could not compete with the telegraph or the telephone. Morse c messages transmitted along a wire had been in commercial operation since 1851. The drawback to the telegram was that the message had to be as brief as possible - and it was often a bringer of bad news. In the Great War the arrival of a yellow telegram invariably meant that a member of the family had been killed. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875 and exchanges were found in major cities within 20 years. But initially, as the operator was listening in, it was about as private as shouting across the room. Until the development of automatic exchanges telephone conversations were often stilted exchanges of information. The price of long-distance calls was prohibitive until the sixties, which meant that the phone remained a luxury item in Britain long after it became part of the furniture in other developed economies. There are still four times as many telephone lines per head of the population in Norway and Sweden as in the UK. A century later and the situation has reversed. The phone is intimate, most people use it as their primary means of communication while the written word - in the form of email - is shorter and sharper and maintains a distance. Within the next few years the mobile phone, which only 15 years ago involved lugging around a car battery, will be part of most people's lives. The world was shrunk further by two major achievements 55 years apart. In 1901 Marconi successfully transmitted a radio message across the Atlantic freeing long distance communications from the tyranny of the wire. Millions of people now analyse radio waves emanating from space in an effort to discern signs of extraterrestrial life. In 1956 the Russians put the first Sputnik into space, six years later the Americans launched Telstar, the first communications satellite. Now dozens of satellites orbit the earth, transmitting TV pictures, bouncing telephone calls and streams of data from continent to continent. The world is a small place. Anyone can buy a handheld GPS (Global Positioning System) for a few hundred pounds. Ships, planes and indeed people need never be lost again. None of this would have been possible without the computer. Initially the computer was seen as a superfast number and data cruncher, a storage device for information. It was a code breaker not a communications device. Yet it has become not just the machine that enables everything else to work it has made the Internet possible. The Internet is actually 30 years old but it has exploded a million fold in this decade, within 10 years billions of people will use it. It is the Twentieth century's most exhilarating gift to the next Millennium.