A decade ago, like any other countries around the world Cambodia began to catch up with Information Technology. The country was left behind the digital era, but it was until 1994 the first electronic communication introduced, years after the Internet came to life. A story of the first Cambodian email user could be found in many news articles in various newspapers. It was back in the early 1990s that a Cambodian government official hoped to continute his higher education in foreign country. The most striking moment was he could not fill in one blank space in the application form: email address. Nobody accessed to the Internet. But, it would be disappointed and dishearten to give up due to that point. As usual, technology invites the world to go on. No e-mail account, no higher education? A group of experts was formed to to setup the first email communication system in this South-east Asian country. It was when the software and necessary tools stored on a floppy disk. Job done. Then the man made it to Europe for his study. The first Internet service provider in Cambodia, Camnet, operated by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, was established in May 1997. And very soon later, an Australian telecommunications company, Big Pond, also made its presence as competitor. The established office in Phnom Penh with its server in Cambodia connected the main one in Australia. Dial-up Internet connections were made available to some non-government organizations and business enterprises that could afford the monthly fee and per-hour usage charge. It is, at any rate, comparable to how the Internet came to home users in the U.S. about twenty years ago.
The story went on that he could not communicate with his wife. It was language barrier. She could only read and write Khmer. In 2002 Matt McKinney of the Cambodia Daily wrote that
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