The British Journal of Psychotherapy on the Internet

Since 26 October 1995 information about the BJP has been mounted on the Internet as part of the ‘World Wide Web’. I have mounted the contents page, the editorial, the instructions to authors, subscribers and advertisers and the credits page. I started with volume 12(1) and have just mounted 12(2) in the same way. The information is mounted at:

sghms.ac.uk

I imagine that some readers will have some very clear sense of what this means and may be perfectly capable of typing that address into a computer and browsing through the information there. Others may have a sense that the Internet is something desperately hyped and rather widely denigrated, might be wondering about pathological manic, projective and dissociative processes and feel that this is a topic of no interest to them. I hope there are a number between these extremes who feel some scepticism but may want to read on.

The Internet came into being when the American military realized that the electromagnetic pulse from an aerial nuclear explosion would devastate most solid state hardware over a large area. They decided the answer was to develop a network of computers obeying a very simple routing system for messages ensuring that messages would find their own way from the sending computer to the target computer as long as some proportion of the plethora of possible interconnections through any number of any other computers between were still intact. The system boils down roughly to an agreement to pass on to someone else any message that is not for you. This idea was grabbed with enthusiasm by academic computing centres in the USA and a number of other countries, and soon national networks of academic computers were connected together with commercial and military networks giving the capacity to send electronic mail messages to people anywhere else on that ‘inter-network’ (hence ‘Internet’). The costs were, at least initially, underwritten by central academic fu