Tracy Reed is an American writer who created the first episodic online story, the ''

QuantumLink Serial The QuantumLink Serial is a work of episodic online fiction by the American writer Tracy Reed. It is considered the first such project ever. The series ran from 1988 to 1989. It was also known as the ''PC-Link Serial'' and the ''AppleLink Seri ...

'' on

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...

(then called Quantum Computer Services). The series debuted in 1988, and was played out in online chat rooms, emails and traditional narrative. The series also went by the name ''The

AppleLink Serial The QuantumLink Serial is a work of episodic online fiction by the American writer Tracy Reed. It is considered the first such project ever. The series ran from 1988 to 1989. It was also known as the ''PC-Link Serial'' and the ''AppleLink Seri ...

'' and ''The

PC-Link Serial The QuantumLink Serial is a work of episodic online fiction by the American writer Tracy Reed. It is considered the first such project ever. The series ran from 1988 to 1989. It was also known as the ''PC-Link Serial'' and the ''AppleLink Seri ...

'' on those services before they were all unified under the AOL brand when Quantum changed its name. After each week's chapter was published, users wrote to author Reed suggesting how they could be part of the story. Each week Reed chose one to a handful of users on each of the three services and wrote them into the story, depicting how they interacted with the fictional characters. The project was personally greenlighted by AOL Marketing VP (later President)

Steve Case Stephen McConnell Case (born August 21, 1958) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). Case joined AOL's predecessor company, Quantum Computer ...

and produced by Kathi McHugh. Later titles, the most famous of which was ''

The Spot The Spot, or thespot.com, was the first episodic online story (1995–1997), and covered bandwidth and production costs by offering paid advertising banners on the web pages and product placement within the journal entries. The site earned one o ...

'' added photos and video to the stories, and introduced the advertising-supported model that became standard during the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

dot-com boom The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

. Reed's work also is a building block in the development of

Alternate reality game An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by inten ...

s. In 2010 a Northern California

interactive theater Interactive theatre is a presentational or theatrical form or work that breaks the "fourth wall" that traditionally separates the performer from the audience both physically and verbally. In traditional theatre, performance is limited to a desig ...

group announced that they were producing a new interactive drama by Reed, "The Koi Pond.""'The Koi Pond' by Tracy Reed is a completely new kind of Interactive Theatre that takes place on the Net."
Sausalito Electric Theatre Company, Accessed April 30, 2010

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reed, Tracy Living people Year of birth missing (living people) AOL people Place of birth missing (living people) American women in business 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers