It has finally happened.

Television, the great wasteland, finally has some real competition.

Business Week magazine reports on a poll of 1,000 U.S. households, 60 percent of adults, or over 200 MILLION people, browse the web.

Up from 40 percent a year ago.

Let me repeat that...

Over 200 MILLION people now browse the web.

Wow! That's incredible.

It was also reported that in the year 2000, computers outsold television sets for the first time. This is big, big news.

This means consumers tastes are changing.

In a study commissioned by computer maker AST Corporation (published in Crains Small Business reports), children ages 6 and up in homes with computers spend an average of 8 hours a week using the PC.

This means you can get your kids off TV just by getting a computer. Kids like using computers because they are infinitely patient and always give positive feedback. (How many parents or teachers can say the same thing?)

So it makes sense then that the AST study identified the average PC purchaser as someone between the ages of 18 and 26 and senior citizens.

But what was surprising what they also discovered was that this "Average" purchaser spends 13 hours a week with the PC themselves.

Let me repeat that. The average PC purchaser spend 13 hours a week with their computer.

This is incredible.

The demands for these individuals' time are enormous. So where do they get the time?

From television.

Television Is Losing Children, Young Adults AND Senior Citizens to Computers.

According to Dennis Cox, AST's director of marketing... "This data strongly indicates that the personal computer is seen as a more useful and important tool in the home than the television set. As consumers become more aware of the possibilities of home PCs - from multimedia education and games to the wild frontier of the information superhighway - the home PC will evolve as the central appliance in the home, controlling video, audio, faxes, and routing incoming calls to mobile phones, all from a single machine."

There are some other things happening you should know about.

The growth of home PCs has started a new phenomena.

"Home-based Telecommunications"

Don't let these words scare you. They just mean now you can connect your computer to a service that allows your computer to talk to other computers. This is all part of the Information Superhighway and it's here now.

You have already heard of the Internet, but let me briefly tell you a little about it.

The Internet is simply a bunch of cables connecting computers together. These cables stretch all over the world allowing information to pass freely back and forth.

This interconnection of cables from computer to computer creates a network. And so the word "inter net" evolved.

You all know how your telephone works. You pick up the hand-set and dial a number. Your call goes to the central office and gets routed to the telephone you want to ring.

The Internet is the same thing.

Your personal computer calls another, bigger computer, and that computer is already connected to all the other big computers all over the world. So when your personal computer connects, you instantly have access to all the world's largest computers.

This is so cool!

With one phone call, your little PC, the one sitting in your den, can connect to the Louvre Museum in France and allow you to examine dozens of Claude Monet paintings. Or paintings from any of the other artists of the Impressionist period.

Or, perhaps you'd like to stay a little more local. How about a tour of the library of congress (at http://WW1.lcweb.loc.gov) where you can view an entire collection of photos of the civil war? Of course, these photos are in the public domain and would make an excellent CD ROM for you to create and offer as a Freebie to induce a prospect to become your customer. An instant Website business.

So here's a way you can make money with the PC in your den.

Get on the Internet, download public domain images, put them on a CD ROM and sell the CDs. This is just ONE example. And, over 200 million people have access to your Website business.

What Makes It A Revolution is not that you can do it. It's that you can do it for FREE.

That's right. FREE.

Once you're connected to the Internet, accessing all these other computers is free.

You see, back in the bad old days when we were afraid of Russia dropping the Big One on us, the US government wanted to protect computers from attack. So they published a set of specifications that would allow all computers to talk to each other, then funded the fiber optic cable connections so that if the computers in Washington DC were destroyed in a nuclear attack, the government could move all its data to the computers at the University of Southern California, or any of the other computers installed all over the US. In major corporations, major universities and then smaller universities and businesses.

Well, then all the army and navy bases all over the world wanted to be connected, so the cables were stretched overseas.

Then Universities, working on defense projects, would be working with Universities in France and England and so they got connected. Then companies doing defense business needed to be connected and businesses connected their computers together.

So now, most of the world's big computers are all connected. And since many of the connections were paid for by tax dollars... access is FREE.

The trouble was you had to be a computer GEEK to communicate. You had to know lot's of computer lingo and and most of what was available was text. No pictures, no sound, not even very much color, so working the Internet was left to scientist and students.

This all changed in October, 1994, when Mark Andereeson of the National Center for Super Computing Applications at the University of Illinois headed a team that developed a graphical interface that created the World Wide Web. (This used to be a small area of the Internet, as many as 10,000 people a day were connecting to the World Wide Web.) This graphic interface was called a "Browser". This "Browser" now allows you to view documents that include photographic images, scanned images, sound recording, video clips, and other multimedia elements.

So now instead of a clunky old text device, you can splash color photographs or video clips in any kind of document you want. And anyone, from anywhere who has an Internet connection view your document for FREE.

That's right, FREE. I know I've got you thinking.