Hypertext publisher From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eastgate Systems is a hypertext publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts.[1]
| Company type | corporation |
|---|---|
| Industry | Macintosh software industry Windows software industry Electronic publishing |
| Founded | December 1982 |
| Headquarters | Watertown, Massachusetts |
| Products | Mac OS, Mac OS X and Windows software |
| Website | www |
Eastgate is a pioneer in hypertext publishing and electronic literature[2][3][4][5] and one of the best known publishers of hypertext fiction.[6] 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,[7] in which much early hypertext fiction was written.[8]
Eastgate's chief scientist, Mark Bernstein, is a hypertext researcher,[9] and has improved and extended Storyspace. He also developed new hypertext software, Tinderbox,[10] a tool for managing notes and information. Storyspace was used in a project in Michigan to put judicial "bench books" into electronic form.[11]
Eastgate Systems was founded by Mark Bernstein in 1982 and developed hypertext tools.[12] Joyce and Bolter launched Storyspace in 1987, at the first annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference on Hypertext.[13] Joyce presented afternoon, a story as a case-study for the tool; the work is widely considered the first work of hypertext fiction[14] and was published by Eastgate in 1990.[15] In 1995, Eastgate published Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl.[16] These legacy works can be found in academic libraries though not all institutions maintain the now obsolete hardware required to interact with these titles.[17] 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.[18]
Robert Coover highlighted Eastgate as "the primary source for serious hypertext" in The New York Times Book Review in 1993,[19] a quote which still features prominently in Eastgate's tagline.[20] Between 1993-6, Eastgate published eight issues of The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext.[21]
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