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To begin with, none of what you are reading now would have been possible without Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce, the principal creators of Storyspace. I particularly want to thank Jay for the HTML export function, which I used to prepare this text for the WorldWideWeb.
I first launched this project in the spring of 1992 while trying to think of something to submit for the second European Conference on Hypertext. My first impulse was to send the text you have here, in Storyspace, on a floppy disk; but as the deadline got closer that resolve faded. I ended up writing another, less confrontational paper (and "paper" indeed it was). Some months later, I re-worked the Storyspace text and published it as a sort of quasi-hypertext in the journal Writing on the Edge.
Why did I chicken out? Probably because at the time I felt professionally and financially insecure, badly in need of a solid publication credit. Or be more charitable and say I wanted to make an argument that computer scientists and designers would take seriously. Whatever my intentions, whether for good or ill, yellow is still yellow.
This is an essay about hypertext and some of the things we might do with it. It needs to be read the way it was written -- as hypertext. I believe strongly that if we want new media to work changes, we will have to change the way we work.
Begin here, or dive in elsewhere.
Stuart Moulthrop
November, 1994
Baltimore, Maryland