• Step 1 - Necessary Hardware - You will need a Mac or PC personal computer (preferably a Pentium IV or Mac G4 or later) with at least a 56k or modem connection (preferably DSL or cable modem). You will need 10-20 metabytes of free space on your hard drive and at least 512K of random access memory (RAM). Although you can communicate using older, slower machines, it will be extremely frustrating. Therefore, if you do not have this configuration, plan on using the alternative facilities previously.