he groceries they put in
the faux parchment copy of 'The U.S. Declaration of Independence' that
became quite literally the cornerstone of Project Gutenberg. That
night, as it turned out, I received my first computer account--I had
been hitchhiking on my brother's best friend's name, who ran the
computer on the night shift. When I got a first look at the huge
amount of computer money I was given, I decided I had to do something
extremely worthwhile to do justice to what I had been given. This was
such a serious, and intense thought process for a college freshman, my
first thought was that I had better eat something to get up enough
energy to think of something worthwhile enough to repay the cost of all
that computer time. As I emptied out groceries, the faux parchment
Declaration of Independence fell out, and the light literally went on
over my head like in the cartoons and comics... I knew what the future
of computing, and the internet, was going to be... 'The Information
Age.' The rest, as they say, is history."

Michael decided to search the books from public domain available in our
libraries, digitize these books, and store the electronic books
(ebooks) in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII--called Plain
Vanilla ASCII--for them to be read on any hardware and software. A
book would become a continuous text file instead of a set of pages,
with caps for the terms in italic, bold or underlined of the print
version. As a text file, a book would be easily copied, indexed,
searched, analyzed and compared with other books. (Doing such searches
is much harder in various markup formats.)

Project Gutenberg's mission would be the following: to put at
everyone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works
from public domain as possible for free. Years later, in August 1998,
Michael wrote in an email interview: "We consider etext to be a new
medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the
same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once
people each find their own comfortable way to etexts, especially in
schools."

After keying in "The U.S. Declaration of Independence" in 1971, Michael
typed in "The U.S. Bill of Rights" in 1972. A volunteer typed in "The
United States Constitution" in 1973.

# Persevering

From one year to the next, disk space was getting larger, by the
standards of the time--there was no hard disk yet--, making it
possible to store larger fi