Humanities computing is on a roll. Multi-media, hypertext, online discussion groups: what had once been seen by many scholars as the preserve of a few strange types who carried outn unspeakably mechanical practices upon sensitive texts has expanded to include all kinds of people and all manner of things. As usual, the avant garde vies most for attention, with sound clips, full-motion video, and astonishingly processed images. A little away from the dazzle of the apparent front line, a quieter revolution has been taking place of equal orgreater significance. As recently as five years ago, projects which only existed to make primary documents available in electronic form provoked a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, and disdain in academics, and anxiety in librarians. Since then, the advance of newtechnology into the temples of humanities academe has reached critical momentum and the priests have no choice but to embrace it. In college and public libraries rows of computers appear like shrines to the gods of the ethernet as old-style reference and reading rooms get retasked into "e-text centers"1. Recognized now as the prophets and messiahs of that holyof holies, the Digital Library, electronic text projects have gained credibility and respectability. Old ones are treated with reverence, new ones spring up daily ; they are feted, feasted, even funded. We can measure the potential of this revolution by noting that capitalism got its foot in the door early in the shape of Chadwyck Healey.