Eastgate Systems

Eastgate Systems is a hypertext publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts.

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.

Eastgate's chief scientist, Mark Bernstein, is a hypertext researcher, and has improved and extended Storyspace. He also developed new hypertext software, Tinderbox, a tool for managing notes and information. Storyspace was used in a project in Michigan to put judicial "bench books" into electronic form.

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.

Products

 * Tinderbox, a content assistant for managing, analyzing and mapping notes in a hypertextual environment.
 * Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment. Storyspace writing environment consists of boxes (nodes) and arrows (named links) that show connections between nodes.

Fiction

 * Michael Joyce: afternoon, a story (1987, 1990), Twilight, a Symphony (1996)
 * Sarah Smith: The King of Space (1991)
 * Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall; Forward Anywhere
 * Judy Malloy: its name was Penelope (1993)
 * Carolyn Guyer: Quibbling (1992)
 * Stuart Moulthrop: Victory Garden (1992)
 * Deena Larsen Marble Springs (1993), Century Cross(1994), Samplers—Nine vicious little hypertexts (1997)
 * John McDaid: Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse
 * Kathryn Cramer: In Small & Large Pieces (1994)
 * Shelley Jackson: Patchwork Girl (1995)
 * Bill Bly: We Descend, Volume One (1997)
 * Richard Holeton: Figurski at Findhorn on Acid (2001)
 * J. Yellowlees Douglas: I have said nothing
 * Kathleen McConnell under Kathy Mac: Unnatural Habitats
 * Kathryn Cramer: In Small & Large Pieces
 * Mary Kim Arnold: Lust
 * Mark Bernstein: Those Trojan Girls (2016)
 * Megan Heyward: Of Day, Of Night (2004)
 * Wes Chapman: Turning In
 * Edward Falco: A Dream with Demons
 * Rob Swigart: Down Time
 * Tim McLaughlin: Notes Toward Absolute Zero
 * Judith Kerman: Mothering
 * Robert Kendall and Richard Smyth: A Life Set for Two
 * Richard Smyth:Genetis
 * Clark Humphrey The Perfect Couple

Non-fiction

 * Roderick Coover:Cultures in Webs
 * David Kolb: Socrates in the Labyrinth
 * Diane Greco: Cyborg, engineering the body electric
 * Eric Steinhart: Fragments of the Dionysian Body
 * George Landow: Writing at the Edge; The Dickens Web;
 * George Landow and Jon Lanestedt:The In Memoriam Web
 * Guiliano Franco: Quam Artem Exerceas