1993 marks the tenth year since Computers and Composition made its debut, a ten year history of dramatic and irreversible change that touches every part of our professional lives. With this tenth birthday, we are pleased to announce a new section in honor of the journal and appropriately titled Computers & History. Bill Wresch's article on the history of computer grading is the first of many articles we plan to feature to give readers an historical perspective on technology and our young field. We hope that manv of you will follow Bill Wresch's lead and submit articles that begin to probe areas that warrant an historical examination.

It is also appropriate that this issue of the journal should feature Jay Bolter's superb keynote address at the 8th Computers and Writing Conference, "Alone and Together in the Electronic Bazaar," in which he talks of the passing of the train, the narrative, and hypertext. Bolter asks us to imagine hypertext in terms of a train trip hypertravel, if you will--and calls his imaginary train trip "the challenge of the narrative." Trains, according to Bolter, give us linear progressions, but for hypertext we must hop on and off airplanes, jumping from one world to another and back again perhaps.

Following Bolter's article is Leigh Star's evocative poem, "The Net." Starr shows us that the world of the net can be every bit as powerful as the allure of hypertext. With Starr, we too travel the net and find ourselves alone and not alone all at once.

Lisa Gerrard returns us from our hypertextual and network wanderings rather abruptly and asks us to consider again the politics of being "computers and compositionists." She wonders if we may not be too quick in adapting the hierarchical structures of English departments, putting theory and theorists ahead of pedagogy and teachers. Charlie Moran also asks us to pause and take a hard look at issues related to funding the computer labs and classrooms we prize. Are we, he asks, like the fields of medicine and banking, raising the costs of education unnecessarily by investing too much too frequently in the new technologies?

Then, in our new section, instead of looking at the possible dangers of the here and now, William Wresch steps back in time and examines a 1960s proposal for grading essays with computers. Wresch suggests that computer text analysis--if not grading--can assist us in research and contribute to an understanding of writing. In doing so, he presents us with rather sophisticated approaches to text analysis in earlier years that can inform research today.

Returning us to the world of teaching, Doris Prater and David Palumbo argue that developments in hypermedia software can help students synthesize their reading. They maintain that constructivist hypermedia environments--where students build nodes and links--will lead more quickly to increased student learning than hypermedia environments used for the presentahon of information. And, finally, moving to the world of research, Lansman, Smith, and Weber argue that computers, in addihon to facilitating learning, can also enrich the kinds of research that the profession undertakes. They describe the WRITING ENVIRONMENT, showing us how writers navigate the system to make it suit their own purposes. In this way, computers canbe used not only to facilitate textual analysis and the study of products but also help track writers and the cognitive processes they employ in writing.

Add to this diverse set of excellent articles Michael Boudreau's comprehensive review of WORD 5.1 and Sibylle Gruber's insightful review of Bruce and Rubin's Electronic Quills, and we have an issue that is indeed a tribute to C~C's tenth birthday. We hopc you enjoy your travels through the articles of our anniversary issue as much as we have elljoyed featuring them. We look forward to seeing many of you next month at the Ninth Computers & Writing Conference at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan (May 20-23).