In recent years, mobile computing has become the focus of vigorous research efforts in various areas of computer science and engineering. These areas include wireless networking, distributed systems, operating systems, - distributed databases, software engineering, applications development, just to name a few. This paper introduces the conceptual overview of mobile computing, its achievements, challenges and opportunities. The current status and ongoing research projects in mobile computing worldwide are detailed. This paper also discusses the two Australian workshops on mobile computing, databases and applications held in 1996 and 1997