Eastgate Systems

Eastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertext. Eastgate is a pioneer in hypertext publishing and electronic literature and one of the best known publishers of hypertext fiction. 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, and Tinderbox, a tool for managing notes and information. Storyspace was used in a project in Michigan to put judicial "bench books" into electronic form. Eastgate's chief scientist, Mark Bernstein, is a well-known figure in hypertext research, and has improved and extended Storyspace as well as developing new hypertext software. 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. 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.