eEVN: a Pan-European radio telescope

Technological advances are changing the nature of VLBI. Disk based recording has already led to substantial increases in sensitivity and with the advent of new telescopes and data acquisition systems VLBI will start penetrating the micro-Jansky sky. With the employment of fibre based communication networks as the basis for production, real-time VLBI networks will become a reality. This changes the way VLBI is done and removes bottlenecks in operation and scientific exploration. At the output side, fantastic new correlator output data rates and the ability to deal with these via powerful PC clusters promises to expand the typical VLBI field-of-view to scales previously reserved for connected, short baseline interferometers. These developments require new algorithms for user processing, as well as new interfaces to present the product to the users.