IS THE TRADITIONAL ART GALLERY GOING THE SAME WAY AS CAVE PAINTING? WILL THE MOUSE REPLACE THE PAINT BRUSH? ANDY BECKETT ACCESSES THE FUTURE OF THE VISUAL ARTS

Last week William Hartston took a knife to the brains trust ...

Richard Barry says the new Web browser from Microsoft is likely to blast Netscape deep into cyberspace

Britain's libraries look likely to follow the example set by seven-day trading, and begin opening on Sundays.

BUNHILL

The work of photographer Ansel Adams is going digital. By Paul Rodgers

Microsoft is fighting to gain lost ground on the Net. Joseph Gallivan reports

You install Windows 95 ... and your Net access is disabled.

When he was eight years old Bill Gates, His Imperial Highness of Information and Potentate of the PC, settled down to work his way through the 1960 World Book Encyclopaedia. "I was determined to read straight through every volume," he recalls. "I could have absorbed more if it had been easy to read all the articles about the 16th century in sequence or all the articles pertaining to medicine. Instead I read about 'Garter Snakes', then 'Gary, Indiana,' then 'Gas'." He gave up when he reached the P's, apparently, seduced by the superior attractions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and his first computer. It's rather spooky, don't you think, this picture of childish absorption? The process sounds strangely mechanical, more like downloading than reading. It is most reminiscent of one of those speeded-up educations that malign computers undergo in science-fiction films. You can almost imagine Ma Gates lying in bed at night and asking Pa, as the light goes off, "Did you remember to unplug Bill, dear?"

There may be something oddly prophetic in Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs, writes Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Today the Times transforms itself into Britain's biggest freesheet. The newspaper is being given away as part of a marketing campaign by Microsoft, the American software company.

Netscape is going to be the Microsoft of the Internet - or so investors hope.

Free countries should be fractious places. Newspapers, television channels, magazines, electronic information services are there to amplify the arguments - in short, to cause more trouble. This newspaper was founded precisely because the great media warlords of print and screen cause too little trouble in the bear garden of ideas.

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