In October 1995, Takeshi Furuhashi and his collegues at the Bio-Electronics Laboratory of Nagoya University, Japan, organized the first of a series of on-line workshops, held entirely on the World Wide Web. The advertised advantages of the on-line format were to allow fruitful exchanges while avoiding physical travel, and to guarantee wide visibility of the discussion. The first two workshops in the series were devoted to evolutionary computation; they can be accessed on the web at http://www.bioele.nuee.nagoya-u.ac.jp. The third workshop, named “First On-Line Workshop on Soft Computing” (WSC1), had a broader scope, including all the techniques that go under the heading of “soft computing”, like fuzzy logic, neuro computing, genetic computing, and so on. WSC1 took place from August 19 to 30 1996, and it is accessible on the web at http://www.bioele.nuee.nagoya-u.ac.jp/wsc1/. Because the declared goal of an on-line workshop is to prompt discussion, the rules for submission were looser than in most traditional workshops: papers were not subject to peer review, and it was possible to submit already published papers. All the submitted papers were made visible on the web one week before the workshop, and people could send comments and questions by email during the two workshop weeks; all the questions, comments, and authors' replies are also visible at the WSC1 web site.