Founder of Project Gutenberg died

Founder of Project Gutenberg died

The founder of Project Gutenberg is dead As reported by the project, Michael died. S. Hart on 6 September in the U.S. state of Illinois Urbana at the age of 64 years. For 40 years Hart had been working to make books and texts as "eBooks" freely available. The Project Gutenberg himself is the oldest project, dedicated to the public, generally prescribed for use by computers. In his last text to Hart dealt with the future of the readers.

Hart launched the Project Gutenberg as a student at the University of Illinois, as he on 4 July 1971, the U.S. Declaration of Independence at a terminal transcribed and stored. The text was by contemporary standards so extensive that it could not be sent as an e-mail. After that it was hard to systematically digitize texts that were considered free of copyright or copyright of the goods as "public domain". His Project Gutenberg was gaining momentum, as Hart was all over the world volunteers who helped with the scanning and correcting the text. According to the Project Gutenberg currently 36 000 books in 60 languages ​​are freely available.

The son of two university professors (English literature and mathematics) Hart grew up in Urbana in an academic environment filled with books. At the same time he was enthusiastic about the electronics, tinkering radios and speakers. More recently, Hart was active in the fabbing scene and worked on the project of a self-replicating machine. Until the end of his life Hart was an optimistic futurist, who firmly believed that one day everyone will keep a copy of the Project Gutenberg with it.

In a text for future readers of the hard gushed from the fact that the e-book readers, the home school movement finds a new impetus. According to the Gutenberg co-founder Gregory Newvy Hart quoted recently, George Bernard Shaw's aphorism: "The reasonable man adapts to the world: the unreasonable persists in trying, the world adapt Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.."

As an advocate of this form of irrationality was Michael S. Hart is not his life blessed with prosperity. His computers were assembled equipment, car and house were repaired itself, rather than the doctors had to prove naturopathy at Harts diseases. All revenue slipped into the Hart Project Gutenberg and the dissemination of books for a humanity that sees reading as a cultural technology and the highest form of communication of knowledge.