Content area
Full Text
Mr. Chan in Hong Kong has to transmit an urgent letter to his overseas business associates. The letter has to reach the other end in an hour. An impossible task you say? Wrong. So, how does he do it? Wait for a miracle to happen while he tears his hair in desperation? Wrong again. Mr. Chan simply turns to his ubiquitous personal computer, the workhorse of the information age -- and it does his mailing for him as soon as he has typed in the letter, to reach the overseas party well within the hour.
Or, imagine that you have misplaced your local telephone directory and yellow pages or feel plain lazy to thumb through the bulky tomes. Once again, it is a simple task for your PC. Or, say you want to know the exact time the flight of your most-valued overseas client touches down at Kai Tak, but the airline's airport office telephone is busy. Yes, by now you have guessed how you may be able to access this information -- through your PC, which can flash the latest flight arrival and departure timings straight from Kai Tak.
But, how do you teach your PC to perform these tricks for you? For, you already have a PC, several in fact, but it doesn't perform these seemingly miraculous tasks. When you get down to it, it's no miracle in fact. You just have to connect your PC to Hong Kong Telecom's Datapak Services. The public data network, provided by Hong Kong's franchised monopoly telecommunication network, offers the above facilities and more, all tailored to meet the needs of the age of information that we live in, increasingly thirsting for quick and frequent movement of real-time as well as historical data.
Hong Kong Telecom has brought within the grasp of almost everyone some of the latest products of the global communications revolution. As elsewhere in the developed world, the demand for high speed and reliable data communications out-stripped the capabilities of voice and telex networks in the territory. Thus, a dedicated data network was set up, back in 1984, by Hong Kong Telephone.
Datapak was initiaily set up as a separate business unit called Datacom...