Text made the net - made it possible, makes it now and for the time being. Text constitutes and encodes the net, in major part, because text was 'digital' avant la lettre or rather, because of the letter. Once linguistic inscription had been encoded in a small character set (1700-1500 BCE in all but the Chinese culture-sphere), an important field of cultural production was already digitised. Literature was transcribed in a medium that is structured in a managable number of discrete objects. It is divisible into well-understood units down to an elementary level, and so easily editable. Moreover, it is editable in such a way that, after redrafting, the fractures and joins of the editing process may be made invisible. These are all features of so-called 'digital' production - now being applied, in particular, to audio-visual material - which are perceived as novel, the 'new' of new media. In fact, they are quite good examples of features found elsewhere in the culture, migrating from literature to the disciplines of image, sound, kinetics, etc., for reasons which are chiefly technical and logistic.