Michael S. Hart
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Michael Stern Hart (b. 1947 in Tacoma, Washington) is an American best known as the founder of Project Gutenberg, which makes electronic books freely available via the Internet. At least one version of each book is a plain text file that can be displayed on virtually any computer. Most of the early postings he typed in personally. Today the e-texts are produced (usually scanned) by Project Gutenberg's many volunteers. The collection includes public domain works, as well as copyrighted works if the owner permits.
Hart's father was an accountant and his mother, a former cryptanalyst during World War II, was a business manager at a retail store. In 1958, they relocated to Urbana, Illinois, and became college professors instead, in Shakespearean studies and mathematics education, respectively. Hart stayed in the area to attend the University of Illinois, completing an independent-study program focused on human-machine interfaces in just two years to receive his bachelor's degree. He continued into graduate school but never finished a degree there.
During his time there, the University of Illinois computer center gave him an account on its system (Hart said a friend of his brother's was the mainframe operator). Although the focus of computer use 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 was trying to think of what to do with it, and seized upon a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, which he had been given at a grocery store on his way home from watching fireworks that evening. He typed the text in on a teletype machine, but could not e-mail it because this might crash the system, so to be read it had to be downloaded individually.
This was the beginning of Project Gutenberg. Hart began posting text copies of such classics as the Bible, the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. As of 1987 he had typed in a total of 313 books in this fashion. Then through being involved in the University of Illinois PC User Group, and with assistance from Mark Zinzow, a programmer at the school, he was able to recruit volunteers and set up an infrastructure of mirror sites and mailing lists for the project. With this the project was able to grow much more rapidly.
As the founder of Project Gutenberg, Hart was approached about being the lead plaintiff in the case that eventually became Eldred v. Ashcroft. However, his desire to focus on attacking the greed of copyright owners in legal briefs for the case was resisted by attorney Lawrence Lessig. Hart related that he only wanted to attach a personal statement of his views in an appendix, and tried for months to draft a suitable statement, but Lessig finally said it would not be included, and Hart withdrew from participation.
Hart is also an author, and the works he has written are available free of charge on the Project Gutenberg server.
See also History of the Internet.
References
- Levy, Steven. "Lawrence Lessig's Supreme Showdown". Wired, October 2002.