Eastgate Systems, Inc. is an American electronic publishing and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts Founded in 1982 by Mark Bernstein, the company is known for its role in the development of hypertext publishing and electronic literature.
Eastgate became one of the best-known publishers of hypertext fiction through works such as afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce and Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. The company publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in hypertext formats and has developed software tools including Storyspace and Tinderbox.
It publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry hypertexts by established authors with careers in print, as well as new authors. Its software tools include Storyspace, a hypertext system created by Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce and John B. Smith, in which much early hypertext fiction was written.
History
Eastgate Systems was founded by Mark Bernstein in 1982 and developed hypertext tools. Joyce and Bolter launched Storyspace in 1987, at the first annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference on Hypertext. Joyce presented afternoon, a story as a case-study for the tool; the work is widely considered the first work of hypertext fiction and was published by Eastgate in 1990. In 1995, Eastgate published Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl. These legacy works can be found in academic libraries though not all institutions maintain the now obsolete hardware required to interact with these titles. However, a number of specialized media labs, such as The NEXT Museum, Library, and Preservation Space, do maintain both the software and the hardware to read these works.
Eastgate has published series of works as hypertext journals, including the Eastgate Quarterly.
Robert Coover highlighted Eastgate as "the primary source for serious hypertext" in The New York Times Book Review in 1993, a quote which still features prominently in Eastgate's tagline. Between 1993-6, Eastgate published eight issues of The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext.
Products
Eastgate developed several software tools associated with hypertext writing and research. Storyspace, created by Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, and John B. Smith, allowed authors to create nonlinear works using linked text nodes and visual maps. Storyspace writing environment consists of boxes (nodes) and arrows (named links) that show connections between nodes. Much early hypertext fiction was written using the platform.
The company later developed Tinderbox, a note-taking and content management application designed for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing interconnected information in a hypertextual environment.
↑Gutermann, Jimmy, 'Hypertext Before the Web,' Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1999 ("Thanks to some successful early attempts at hypertext fiction that Eastgate published (most notably by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop) and a front-page Robert Coover essay in the "New York Times Book Review," Eastgate and Storyspace were closely associated with the emerging field of literary hypertext.")
↑Coover, Robert, 'And Hypertext Is Only the Beginning. Watch Out!' New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1993 ("...the primary source for serious hypertext fictions today is Eastgate Systems, the New Directions of electronic publishing and the supplier of the popular Storyspace software in which most of the hypertext authors I know about have written.")
↑Murphy, Kim, 'Electronic Literature: Thinking Outside the Box,' Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2000; Zack, Ian, 'A Novel Approach to Literature,' The Roanoke Times, July 16, 1999.
↑Denison, D.C. (December 9, 2001). "OnSite (column)". Boston Globe. But how far can you push hypertext? That's the question that inspires Eastgate's chief scientist, Mark Bernstein.... During most of the '80s and '90s, Bernstein devoted his energies to pushing the boundaries of hypertext fiction.
↑Pamela Samuelson (Spring 1992). "Some new kinds of authorship made possible by computers and some intellectual property questions they raise". University of Pittsburgh Law Review. 53 (685). Note 45. Interestingly, Storyspace is now being used as a hypertext system for a project in the state of Michigan to put judicial 'bench books' into electronic form.
↑Landow, George P. (1992). Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 40
↑Ensslin, Astrid (2022). Pre-web digital publishing and the lore of electronic literature. Cambridge elements publishing and book culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-108-90316-5.