This article is divided into three sections: the first focuses on some analogies and historical parallels that shape digital technology, the hypertext and interactivity, such as the book and the printing press. My aim in the second section is to map the development of the creation of digital environments for archives, corpus, libraries and scholarly editions of medieval and Golden Age literary works by the Spanish-speaking academic community from 1986 to 2005. Of course my account cannot be comprehensive, but it aims to be representative, nevertheless. The last section traces the evolution of the relationship between the literary studies and information technology from 2006 until 2013 when the first official Digital Humanities conference took place in Spain.