THIS is the first Olympics to hit the World Wide Web and it will be interesting to see if it can withstand the burden. IBM has done its best with the official Olympic site at: (http://www.atlanta.olympic.org/).

It has installed enough computer power to run a war, including four large mainframes, 80 minicomputers, 250 local area networks and 7,000 PCs. All this equipment is not just to serve up Web pages, of course, but to run the event. The IBM systems are doing everything from selling tickets (up to 3,000 an hour) to delivering results to the world's press.

The International Olympic Committee also has its own, less commercial site at (http://www.olympic.org/). Obviously the Olympics will be covered by almost every newspaper and broadcasting company that is on the Internet.

Two special sites should be worth a look. The first is America's NBC, which is providing television coverage of the Olympics, a fact book, and an interactive video guide on CDRom. Its coverage is at (http:flwww.olympic.nbc.com).

From there you can even download sound files of the NBC Olympic theme, called Bugier's Dream.

The second site is the local paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, at (http://www.atlantagames.com). This is offering, among other things, four views from Cams Across Atlanta cameras where the image on the Web page is updated every five minutes. You've always wanted to see the Carter Presidential Centre and Hartsfield International Airport, and now is your chance.

If you fancy something more educational, Encyclopedia Britannicahas put together a special Olympics site at (http://sports.eb.com). This has three main sections devoted to The Games (a history), The Events (from archery to windsurfing) and The Record (results). However, only visit this site with graphics turned off if you have a highly developed sense of humour.

Keen students of the Britannica may notice that a few non-Americans have sometimes been involved in the Games a fact not always evident from US media coverage.