at no cost. Its critics long considered Project Gutenberg as
impossible on a large scale. But Michael went on keying book
after book during many years, with the occasional help of some
volunteers. Project Gutenberg got its first boost with the
invention of the web in 1990 and its second boost with the
creation of Distributed Proofreaders in 2000, to help
digitizing books from public domain. In 2008, Project Gutenberg
had a production rate of 340 new books each month, 40 mirror
sites worldwide, and books being downloaded by the tens of
thousands every day. There have been Project Gutenberg websites
in the U.S, in Australia, in Europe and in Canada, with more
websites to come in other countries.

= From 1971 until now

# Beginning

As recalled by Michael Hart in January 2009 in an email
interview: "On July 4, 1971, while still a freshman at the
University of Illinois (UI), I decided to spend the night at
the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the UI Materials Research Lab,
rather than walk miles home in the summer heat, only to come
back hours later to start another day of school. I stopped on
the way to do a little grocery shopping to get through the
night, and day, and along with the 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 - fo