Eastgate Systems

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.

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.