Another major hypertext authoring tool of the 1980s not mentioned here is Storyspace, which was the emerging standard for reading and creating works of literary hypertext fiction. If you’ve never heard of any of these works—which were something of a Big Deal in the late 80s and early 90s—that’s because a) most of these works are hard to access on any modern platform on which you’d want to read a whole book (Eastgate is very much to blame for this), and b) they tend to exhibit the worst of the modish, academia-adjacent literary trends of this End of History period, in my biased opinion. They are, however, of interest from the perspective of digital arts history, and it’s a shame that they aren’t easier to access.
When hypertext fiction underwent a small revival in the 2010s via the free software Twine, many of the participating authors had no idea that they were often reinventing the wheel. But how could they have any sense of hypertext fiction as a historical practice, when their antecedents had practically vanished from the record?
When hypertext fiction underwent a small revival in the 2010s via the free software Twine, many of the participating authors had no idea that they were often reinventing the wheel. But how could they have any sense of hypertext fiction as a historical practice, when their antecedents had practically vanished from the record?