QuoteAs a teenager, Veronika Megler was intent on becoming a statistician. She signed up for a computer science course at Melbourne University, reasoning it would assist her chosen career. "I think there were four women in a class of about 220 people, and it was pretty misogynistic," she recalls. Megler had already built her own PC, buying the motherboard, chips, capacitors and diodes from an electronics shop in Melbourne. "In the store they'd say 'tell your boyfriend we don't have these'," she recalls.

QuoteKate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world - a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips - is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work.

The groundwork for this technological behemoth is already well underway, with computers already communicating with one another to allow users to send electronic mail (President Bill Clinton is already connected) and access news, weather and even some shopping services. For the information superhighway to really take off though, it needs more capacity than the UK's ageing network of copper telephone wires can provide. Is Britain prepared to invest in the sort of high-capacity fibre-optic cable network that can make the technological utopia a reality?

Originally broadcast 29 April, 1994.