Re:50 years of eBooks: 1971-2021
by dredmorbius on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:03AM
(#29416972)
Michael Hart's vision was for a future in which computing costs were dramatically lower, access and availability vastly higher. Presentation capabilities of the then-current era were far less a concern.
His goal was to create the digital files themselves, which once they existed in digital form could be endlessly replicated at no cost:
Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing,” that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given … so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.
He then proceeded to type in the “Declaration of Independence” and tried to send it to everyone on the networks … which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the “Internet Virus.”
A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as Michael stated that he had “earned” the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.
In 1971, access would have required mainframe access, either on a line printer or via one of the early CRT-based computer terminals. This Seattle Computer Museum image shows the less-interesting side of the terminal:
His goal was to create the digital files themselves, which once they existed in digital form could be endlessly replicated at no cost:
Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing,” that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given … so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.
He then proceeded to type in the “Declaration of Independence” and tried to send it to everyone on the networks … which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the “Internet Virus.”
A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as Michael stated that he had “earned” the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.
In 1971, access would have required mainframe access, either on a line printer or via one of the early CRT-based computer terminals. This Seattle Computer Museum image shows the less-interesting side of the terminal:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/LCM_-_Xe...
(From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series)
Apparently the Tektronix 4010 was used with the SDS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Tektroni...
On an IBM platform (and possibly others), the IBM 2250, first released in 1964:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2250