Loading Screen of the 1992 Mac Edition of "afternoon"
This video demonstrates what is meant when we say that "a digital work is deeply entangled with material conditions and extensions."
At the time the 1992 Edition of afternoon, a story was released, readers would have needed a computer that could read a 3.5-inch floppy disk. This particular edition, considered the "authoritative edition" of the work, was the first one available for Windows computers, though Macintosh was the platform Joyce preferred and used for developing this hypertext novel. While the work itself cost $25––which, in 1991, was equivalent to the cost of a hardback book, a Macintosh Classic needed for accessing it would have cost $999, which, adjusted for inflation, is equivalent to $10,000 today. Approximately 1.3 million Macintosh computers were sold in 1991, and the potential growth was promising. But, at the time, the computer was outside the reach of most readers.
Reading this hypertext novel required a different approach than a print book. Though afternoon, a story is bundled in a folio resembling a thin volume akin to a hardback, it is contained on a floppy disk that had to be slipped into the computer's floppy disk drive. After the computer ran through the process of reading the disk, the work's icon appears on the screen. To open the novel, readers need to click twice on the icon, a sound you can hear in the video. This action of clicking a word to navigate a literary work and the presence of the sound of clicking differ from the experience readers had with print novels. In fact, afternoon, a story, like all of the hypertext literary works Eastgate Systems, Inc. published on floppy disks, was bundled with a user's guide explaining how to load the work on the computer and move through it.
Also unfamiliar to readers new to hypertext literature is the need to make a decision to "Begin a new reading" or "Resume previous reading." That said, the landing screen also contains information similar to a cover of a print book, such as publisher information and an endorsement by a literary critic––the case of afternoon, a story, Robert Coover of The New York Times lauding the novel for its achievement as a "postmodern classic."
Choosing to start a new reading evokes a loading screen that signals to the reader much important information. First, it lets them know when the file had been "made" and when it was last "modified" and alerts them that the the text amounts to 177 kilobytes of data. Second, the reader gets a sense of the complexity of the novel: There are 539 spaces linked 951 ways. Finally, it takes well over 30 seconds for the reader to begin reading afternoon, a story.
In sum, sitting in front of a computer and accessing a floppy disk storing a novel that changes with every reading and requires the reader to navigate by clicking words signals a shift in material conditions of reading literature from the kind of physicality associated with print to that found in pre-web hypertext literature.