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Project Gutenberg, eBooks Collection > 
Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts). Our present collection of more than 10.000 eBooks was produced by hundreds of volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use.
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. This was totally serendipitous, as it turned out that two of a four operator crew happened to be the best friend of Michael's and the best friend of his brother. Michael just happened "to be at the right place at the right time" at the time there was more computer time than people knew what to do with, and those operators were encouraged to do whatever they wanted with that fortune in "spare time" in the hopes they would learn more for their job proficiency. At any rate, Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of "normal computing," that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given ... so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. 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 Michael stated that he had "earned" the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.
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Gutenberg, Inventor of Movable Type
Gutenberg, Johannes, German printer and pioneer in the use of movable type, sometimes identified as the first European to print with hand-set type cast in molds. Detaile... |
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Gutenberg Bible, First Real Printed Book
In the mid-15th century Johann Gutenberg invented a mechanical way of making books. This was the first example of mass production. He was born about 1400, the son of a ri... |
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