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Michael S. Hart
Summary
Michael Stern Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011) was an American author, best known as the inventor of the e-book and the founder of Project Gutenberg (PG), the first project to make e-books freely available via the Internet. He published e-books via ARPANET years before the Internet existed, and later on BBS networks and Gopher servers.
Hart devoted his life after founding PG in 1971 to digitizing and distributing literature from works in the public domain with free and expired copyrights. The first e-books were typed in plain text format and published as s; other formats were made available later. Hart typed most of the early e-books himself; later, volunteers expanded the project.
Michael Hart was born on March 8, 1947, in Tacoma, Washington. His father was an accountant and his mother, a former cryptanalyst during World War II, was a business manager at a retail store. In 1958 his family relocated to Urbana, Illinois, and his father and mother became college professors in Shakespearean studies and mathematics education, respectively. Hart attended the University of Illinois, graduating in just two years with a degree in Human-Machine Interfaces. He then attended but did not complete graduate school. He was also, briefly, a street musician.
Project Gutenberg
During Hart's time at the University of Illinois, the computer center gave Hart a user's account on its computer system; Hart's brother's best friend was the mainframe operator and gave an account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time; its value at that time has since been variously estimated at 100,000,000. Although the focus of computer use there tended to be data processing, Hart was aware that it was connected to a network (part of what would become the Internet) and chose to use his computer time for information distribution. Hart related that after his account was created on July 4, 1971, he wanted to "give back" by doing something that could be considered to be of great value.
Official source
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