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Screens are a particular case of writing surface and, manifestly, they are shifting our experience of written language, although more slowly than might have been expected. In the early days of personal and networked computing, screens carried text, but did so in a manner that ran counter to the highly developed aesthetics of print and literary culture. Moreover, this occurred at the same time that screens were establishing themselves, in the form of television, as the visual business end of receivers for broadcast representations of distant real-world spaces. To do so it employs conventional, illusionistic spatial representations, generated by and adapted from lens optics, photography and film. Today, when we use a computer screen, not only do we expect it to be capable of these visual representations, so familiar from film and television, we also demand a fair degree of spatial representation in our software tools, even when all we are doing is, for example, typing.