From n + 1 (see this LH post), an interesting essay by Robert Moor about the history of the e-book (“usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S. Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server”) and an associated concept, electronic literature:
The field of electronic literature began as a hundred loose strands, which briefly appeared to braid into a new art form called hypertext fiction. The influential hyperfictionist Stuart Moulthrop’s “Subjective Chronology of Cybertext, Hypertext, and Electronic Writing” cites as the form’s founding influences a 1945 Atlantic article by Vannevar Bush that envisioned a machine for organizing and linking information; a 1961 computer game called Spacewar!; the writings of Robert Coover, Milorad Pavic, and Thomas Pynchon; the work of hypertext pioneer and theorist Ted Nelson; and Donna Haraway’s 1991 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Those influences collided in the mid 1980s, when a novelist (and early PC adopter), Michael Joyce, working from his home in Michigan, grew frustrated with the constraints of his word processing software. For decades, experimental writers like Coover had been pushing against the static linearity of the page—a restriction that, Joyce quickly realized, ceased to exist in a digital space. “In my eyes, paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes,” Joyce later wrote. “All that kept me from doing so was the fact that, in print at least, one paragraph inevitably follows another.”
When Joyce met a young computer scientist named Jay David Bolter at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1984, they began working on such a program. They called it StorySpace, because it allowed readers to navigate a text spatially rather than sequentially, by following hypertextual threads like corridors in a labyrinth. Partly to test out the new software, Joyce wrote afternoon, a story (1987), which is known as the world’s first hypertext novel.
Moor describes some interesting experiments, but I think I’ll stick with boring old sequential text. (Thanks, Paul!)