• The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg (1971???? I had no idea!!!) – Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

  He then proceeded to type in the "Declaration of Independence" and tried to send it to everyone on the networks … which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the "Internet Virus."

  A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as

Tags: books, digital, etext, gutenberg, history, reading, readingahead

2 Responses to “ChittahChattah Quickies”

My project this year has been putting together a conference celebrating U of I’s public computing accomplishments including Project Gutenberg, PLATO (from 1960!) and Mosaic. Save the date April 15-16, 2010

Comment by Marcela Musgrove 11.17.09 @ 9:59 am

Reply





That’s pretty exciting! Good for you!

Comment by Steve Portigal 11.17.09 @ 11:43 am

Reply