The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations: The Multimedia Accompaniment to the Print Edition

Floppy Disks for the 1987 Edition of afternoon


The first two editions of Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, the 1987 and 1989 Editions, are produced with Version 3.3 of Storyspace. While Kirschenbaum refers to these two editions as "beta"editions ("Editing the Interface" 27), Joyce himself considers them to be "finished literary work" (5 June 2020).         

The 1987 Edition is recognized as the 1st Edition of the work (Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, 2008). According to Joyce, approximately 50 copies were distributed on floppy disk to participants at the 1987 ACM Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by Jay David Bolter and himself (Barnett 129). Kirschenbaum points out the anomaly found in this edition of the node entitled "Jung," "that contains no inbound links and no scripted text," an issue corrected in subsequent editions of the work (Kirschenbaum, "Editing the Interface," 32). To access the work, readers need a Macintosh computer, Plus or greater, with 160K RAM. The floppy disk featured in this image, according to Joyce, represents one of the few copies left of the 1st Edition, signed and inscribed for his two sons (Joyce, 8 June 2020).

It has not been possible to get an image of the 1989 Edition, though this label used for the 1987 was produced for it but incorrectly listed as the 1987 Edition, which originally sported a label inscribed with a Sharpie pen.

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