States Declaration of Independence
(signed on July 4, 1776) to the mainframe he was using. In upper case, because
there was no lower case yet. But to send a 5 K file to the 100 users of the
embryonic internet would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where
the eText was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still
20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. Project Gutenberg was born.

Michael decided to use this huge amount of computer time to search the public
domain books that were stored in our libraries, and to digitize these books. He
also decided to store the electronic texts (eTexts) in the simplest way, using
the plain text format called Plain Vanilla ASCII, so they can be read easily by
any machine, operating system or 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.

Soon afterwards he defined Project Gutenberg's mission: to put at everyone's
disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works of the public domain as
possible for free. As he stated years later, in August 1998, "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."

= Persevering from 1972 to 1989

After he keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence in 1971, Michael
went on in 1972 and typed in a longer text, The United States Bill of Rights,
that includes the ten first amendments added in 1789 to the Constitution (dated
1787) and defining the individual rights of the citizens and the distinct powers
ot the Federal Government and the States. In 1973, Michael typed in the full
text of The United States Constitution.

From one year to the next, disk space was getting larger, by the standards of
the time (there was no hard disk yet), so it was possible to plan bigger files.
Michael began typing in the Bible, because the individual books of the Bible
could be processed separately as different files. He also worked on the
collected works of Shakespeare, with one play at a time, and a file for each
play. That edition of Shakespeare was never released, due to copyright changes.
If Shakespeare's works belong to the public domain, the comments and notes may
be copyrighted, depending on the publication da