Another cool piece of digital history is the story of the first eBook. They are everywhere now, but before 1971, none existed. We only had physical and audiobooks at that time.
The eBook began when a student at the University of Illinois, Michael Hart, received an account with a virtually unlimited amount of time on the Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer.
Hart wanted to repay this generous gift by giving something back to the world. His grand vision was to make the 10,000 most referenced books available to the public at little or no cost by the year 2000.
This led to his creation of Project Gutenberg. It is a volunteer effort that digitizes and archives cultural works. It’s still going strong. I’m a proud Gutenberg volunteer.
You can visit here to browse 70,000 free eBooks, and volunteer: https://gutenberg.org/.
The first thing Hart digitized was the United States Declaration of Independence. The time it took the Xerox mainframe to do this is estimated at $100,000 to $100,000,000!
Thank goodness it’s much cheaper to produce eBooks now!
P.S. Easily create your own eBooks with Sqribble! One place charges $450 for a single eBook template. Here you’ll be able to produce eBooks, reports, and more in minutes.P.P.S. If you’d like to follow my journeys via email and get a gift, click this link.