Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, died at his home in Urbana, Illinois on September 6. “On July 4, 1971, Hart tried out a new idea of his: typing the text of the Declaration of Independence on a computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He made the text available to other computer users, and then to other network users, and he soon began entering more texts. As the project grew in usefulness, volunteers from around the world pitched in to research, scan, type, and proofread everything from Montaigne’s complete essays to the P.G. Wodehouse comic masterpiece My Man Jeeves. (This being the Internet, the most popular title right now is the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.)“
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