Michael S. Hart
| Michael S. Hart | |
|---|---|
Michael Hart (left) and Gregory Newby of Project Gutenberg at H.O.P.E Conference, 2006
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| Born |
Michael Stern Hart March 8, 1947 Tacoma, Washington, U.S. |
| Died | September 6, 2011 (aged 64) Urbana, Illinois, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Occupation | Author |
| Known for | Project Gutenberg |
| Website | hart |
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 years before the Internet existed via the ARPANET, and later on BBS networks and .
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 text files; 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.
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 or $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 and had had a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, which he had been given at a grocery store after watching fireworks that evening. He typed the text into the computer but was told that it would be unacceptable to transmit it to numerous people at once via e-mail. Thus, to avoid crashing the e-mail system, he made the e-text available for people to download.
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