Introduction

Abstract

Nobody foresaw the rapid commercial growth of the Internet that occurred during the mid-1990s. Nor can we anticipate the changes that computers and networks will bring to writers over the next ten or twenty years. But we can reliably predict that change will continue, at an ever-increasing pace. Seven hundred years separated the invention of block printing and the next major advance in text technology, the printing press. Then there was a gap of four hundred years to the next great writing invention, the typewriter; then sixty years to the next, the word processor; and just thirty years later the first Internet writing tools and environments are beginning to appear. So recent are they that we have no collective name for this menagerie of MOOs, MUDs, Webs and Gophers.