A ONE SCREEN INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT GUTENBERG
Project Gutenberg believes that the biggest impact of an age
of computers will be mass storage/retrieval of information in an
home environment which will allow quick and accurate access to a
world of ever increasing information. Already, with 360K floppy
disks, anyone can put the compete works of Shakespeare on only a
few dollars worth of disks when a paper copy costs 10 times that
amount and cannot be easily reindexed or searched for quotes.
We also cannot be unaware that that which liberates some can
undoubtedly threaten others. We have been told many times of an
ever increasing number of librarians an academics who feel quite
threatened by the advancement of electronic libraries, moreso in
approximately half the cases than they feel the benefits.
Whether we profit or not, are recognized pos or neg, we will
A ONE SCREEN HISTORY OF PROJECT GUTENBERG #1 OF A SERIES
Project Gutenberg was begun in early 1971 on a Xerox Sigma V
64K mainframe computer at the University of Illinois. The first
of Project Gutenberg texts was the United States' Declaration of
Independence, which was followed by the Constitution. The texts
were prepared on paper tape at a teletype machine and uploaded a
new time upon each request until hard disk space was sufficient,
which didn't last long and we were demoted to a tape which users
requested to be mounted several hours before they wanted a file.
For the next 15 years very little change occured in the text
acquistion area, though the computers got smaller and cheaper in
ever increasing increments as the project was moved to an S-100,
then to an OKI CP/M machine, then to an IBM XT, and resides in a
33Mhz 386 with a gigabyte of CDC SCSI hard disk storage today.
Contributors now reach from coast to coast in North America,
and the Gutenberg listserver has members across both oceans. In
1989, as per our hopes and public prediction, etexts have become
recognized as soemthing beyond "an idea ahead of its time" after
18 years of "You guys want to put Shakespeare on disk? You must
be crazy!" End of Part 1 Your comments are solicited.
other_1989_12_21_history_of_project_gutenberg.txt
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