WASHINGTON -- Freda Herman's fingers are crippled from arthritis. Her hearing is almost gone. Her sight is little better. But she sits before a computer at the Rockynol retirement home near Akron, Ohio, and expects to be fully on-line by her 102nd birthday next February. Her teacher, Jim Ginn, to whom she refers (to his delight) as "this young man," is 66.


Herman, who never married, has no children nor any other close family, had just about given up on life. Those who know her say she took out her hearing aids and didn't bother with them or anything else. If she couldn't hear or see people, they just weren't there.


Then Senior Net came to Rockynol. The brainchild of Mary Furlong, the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization is designed to introduce those over 55, those not "raised" on computers, to the joys of being on-line. With more than 60 learning centers across the country, there also are special setups for Internet surfers with disabilities, including a center for the blind in California. The group charges an annual membership of $35.


Herman joined residents from the retirement center on a tour of the Ohio center. She was fascinated, and informed a surprised staff she wanted to learn more. So back in went the hearing aids and Freda Herman set out to surf the Net. She hasn't quite gotten up to electronic mail, but Jim Ginn expects her to be tooling down the information superhighway any time. Meanwhile, she is arguably the oldest person on-line in the world.


Senior Net has about 17,000 members, a niche on the U.S. on-line service America Online, and an estimated 4,000 members on-line every day, according to Senior Net spokesman Bradley Haas. It has a place on the new Microsoft network that comes with Windows 95, the Macintosh-like computer operating system expected to more or less take over the world.


But there are a lot of seniors who think Senior Net's membership is only a fraction of those on-line.


The American Association of Retired Persons went on-line on the three major services -- America Online, Prodigy and CompuServe -- about a year ago. According to AARP's Tom Otwell, around 80,000 people log on to these AARP spots every month, but there is no way to tell their ages or how many are repeats -- the same person signing on several times. "That certainly flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that all seniors are computer-phobes," Otwell said.


Take Betty Schleicher, for example. She lives in North Canton, Ohio, is "72 but I look 55." After her husband died, her son put together a computer setup for her "with all the bells and whistles." For the first few months, she said, "all I was doing was messing around -- writing letters, doing word processing, playing games, and I thought to myself, 'There's got to be more to life than this on the computer.'" At about that time she saw an ad in the Akron paper for Senior Net classes at Rockynol. "Oh my," she said. "I have had such interesting experiences."


America Online's special place on its service for Senior Net permits seniors to chat with each other and exchange information (anything from care of pets to World War II reminiscences to Holocaust information to lyrics to old songs -- really old songs, sometimes.)


Gwen McNamee, 78 and a three-time member of the Peace Corps (since she turned 50), started her own word-processing business a few years ago in Arlington, Virginia. "But I started wondering what good I was doing," she said. "I felt like I wasn't doing anything worthwhile." So she found a niche at a community center where she teaches seniors once a week. ("The trouble is," she said, "we only have three computers. We really need more computers -- put that in the paper," she directed.)


Estelle Jacobs bought her first computer when she was 69, about two years ago. "Why? Well you see those [young] tellers at the bank plugging away and you figure, 'Gee, if they can do it, I can do it.'"


It wasn't that easy though, she said. "Listen, I thought it was sort of like a TV. You turn it on and it tells you what to do!" Now, she said "it's more like buying a piano. Who would buy a piano without getting a piano teacher?"


Jacobs took a course at the computer store, but found it painfully slow. Then she ran into a friend, Glorya Scherr, who was getting into computers for her retail dress business. They got together, hired a computer coach, then decided they could teach other seniors. Their company, in Bethesda, Maryland, is called Training for the Terrified, aimed at over-50s. Jacobs doesn't bother with the computer's innards -- "After all," she said, "when you learn to drive, do you care when you turn the key on that it's the spark plug that ignites the whatever? Who cares? When I have [car] trouble I call the AAA!"


Jacobs and Scherr made their company a Triple A for computers. They teach small classes or send a teacher to people's homes if they prefer. They charge $450 for 10 hours of training, including support and follow-up.


All over the world the Internet and on-line services are attracting senior members. In Canada, a "Cyberpals" web site for the Seniors Computer Information Project has drawn responses from Israel, Sweden, South Africa, Australia, Holland, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Japan and England in addition to the United States and Canada. SCIP, a project of a Manitoba seniors organization and the Canadian Seniors Independence Program of Health, offers on-line assistance on such topics as "Advocacy," "Health" and "Legal problems." Another Canadian group, Seniors On-Line, said more than 25,000 "surfers" have visited its home page.


Betsy Campbell, not quite 30, decided when she was getting her master's degree at Harvard in computer technology that she would explode the myth that old people were not candidates for Web surfing. She brought together a group of seniors in Boston and in six months had them searching for the perfect on-line wave. She sees it as creating a worldwide community and concluded, "It's just not true that seniors are technophobes."


This week about 800 people will participate in the "Seniors Forum on Technology" in Sydney. Mark McCormick, policy officer of the New South Wales Directorate on Aging, and his staff are asking seniors on-line all over the world to send greetings.


McCormick has "no idea" how many Australian seniors are on-line but "two research projects are underway at the moment which may shed some light on that."