A Brief History of the Internet / The Bright Side: The Dark Side

by Michael Hart; Maxwell Fuller

Produced by Michael Hart

A Brief History of the Internet The Bright Side: The Dark Side by Michael Hart with Max Fuller

(C)1995, Released on March 8th, 1995

Chapter 00 Preface

The Internet Conquers Space, Time, and Mass Production…

Michael Hart called it NeoMass Production [TM] in 1971… and published the U.S. Declaration of Independence on the and no one was listening…or were they? ???careful!!!! If the governments, universities or colleges of the world wanted people to be educated, they certainly could have a copy of things like the Declaration of Independence where everyone could get an electronic copy. After all, it has been over 25 years since the Internet began as government funded projects among our universities, and only 24 years since the Declaration was posted, followed by the Bill of Rights, Constitution, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.

Why do more people get their electronic books from others than these institutions when they spend a TRILLION DOLLAR BUDGET EVERY YEAR pretending their goal is some universal form of education.

This is the story of the Bright Side and Dark Side of the Internet. . .Bright Side first.

The Facts:

The Internet is a primitive version of the "Star Trek Communicator," the "Star Trek Transporter," and, also a primitive version of the "Star Trek Replicator."

Communicator

The Internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the Earth, as long as they, too, are on the Internet.

Transporter

The Internet "let's" you transport anything you would be able to get into your computer to any Netter.

Replicator

The Internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from "The Mona Lisa" to "The Klein Bottle" if you use the right "printer," and the library never closes, the books are always on the shelves, never checked out, lost, in for binding, and there is never an overdue fine because you never, ever, have to take them back.

The Bright Side and the Dark Side

For the first time in the entire history of the Earth, we have the ability for EVERYONE to get copies of EVERYTHING as long as it can be digitized and communicated to all of the people on the Earth, via computers [and the devices a person might need to make a PHYSICAL, rather than VIRTUAL copy of whatever it might be. . .

Think about what you have just read for a moment, please,
EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. . .

as long as the Information Superhighway is not taken over by the INFORMATION RICH and denied access to others other than for a fee they may not be able to pay, and shouldn't have to pay. . .since the INFORMATION RICH have had rides for free for the first 25 years of the Internet.]

From 1969 to 1994, most of the traffic on the Information Superhighway was generated by individuals who did not pay tolls to get on the ramps to the Information Superhighway . . .in fact, ALL of the early users were paid to get on, except one. . .they were paid. . .BY YOU!

Michael Hart may have been the first person who got on as a private individual, not paid by any of the 23 nodes, or the Internet/ARPANet system, for his work; but who at the time of this publication might have given away 25 billion worth of Etexts in return for his free network access.

[i.e. Mr. Hart was the first "normal" person to have this access to the Internet, a first non-computer-professional for social responsibility; "We should provide information to all persons, without delay. . .simply because WE CAN!" Just like climbing Mount Everest or going into space, and this is so much cheaper and less dangerous.

[For those of you considering asking that his accesses be revoked, he has received permission from CCSO management, previously CSO as indicated in his email address, for the posting of this document and has also received permission from several other colleges and/or universities, at which he has computer accounts and/or is affiliated.]

In the beginning, all the messages on the Net were either hardware or software crash messages, people looking for a helping hand in keeping their mainframes up and running— and that was about it for the first 10-15 years of cyber- space. . .cyber-space. . .mostly just space. . .there was nothing really in it for anyone, but mainframe operators, programmers, and a few computer consultants who worked in multi-state regions because there weren't enough computer installations in any single state, not even California or Illinois, to keep a computer consultant in business.

The Bright Side

Mr. Hart had a vision in 1971 that the greatest purpose a computer network would ever provide would be the storage, transmission, and copying of the library of information a whole planet of human beings would generate. These ideas were remarkably ahead of their time, as attested to by an Independent Plans of Study Degree in the subject of Human Machine Interfaces from the University of Illinois, 1973. This degree, and the publications of the first few Etexts [Electronic Texts] on the Internet, began the process the Internet now knows as Project Gutenberg, which has caught fire and spread to all areas of the Internet, and spawned several generations of "Information Providers," as we now have come to call them.

It is hard to log in to the Internet without finding many references to Project Gutenberg and Information Providers these days, but you might be surprised just how much of a plethora of information stored on the Internet is only on line for LIMITED DISTRIBUTION even though the information is actually in the PUBLIC DOMAIN and has been paid for in money paid by your taxes, and by grants, which supposedly are given for the betterments of the human race, not just a favored few at the very top 1% of the INFORMATION RICH.

Many of you have seen the publicity announcements of such grants in the news media, and an information professional sees them all the time.

You may have seen grants totalling ONE BILLION DOLLARS to create "Electronic Libraries;" what you haven't seen is a single "Electronic Book" released into the Public Domain, in any form for you to use, from any one of these.

The Dark Side

Why don't you see huge electronic libraries available for download from the Internet?

Why are the most famous universities in the world working on electronic libraries and you can't read the books?

If it costs $1,000 to create an electronic book through a government or foundation grant, then $1,000,000,000 funds for electronic libraries should easily create a 1,000,000 volume electronic library in no time at all.

After all, if someone paid YOU $1,000 to type, scan or to otherwise get a public domain book onto the Internet, you could do that in no time at all, and so could one million other people, and they could probably do it in a week, if they tried really hard, maybe in a month if they only did it in their spare time. For $1,000 per book, I am sure a few people would be turning out a book a week for as long as it took to get all million books into electronic text.

There has been perhaps ONE BILLION DOLLARS granted for an electronic library in a variety of places, manners, types and all other diversities; IF THE COST IS ONE THOUSAND OF THOSE DOLLARS TO CREATE A SINGLE ELECTRONIC BOOK, THEN WE SHOULD HAVE ONE MILLION BOOKS ONLINE FOR EVERYONE TO USE.

HOW HAS THIS PROCESS BEEN STOPPED?

Anyone who wants to stop this process for a Public Domain Library of information is probably suffering from several of the Seven Deadly Sins:

Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, greed, envy, and sloth.
Merriam Webster Third International Unabridged Dictionary
[Above: Greed = Gluttony, and moved back one place]

[Below: my simple descriptions of the Seven Deadly Sins]

1. Pride: I have one and you don't.

2. Covetousness: Mine is worth more if you don't have a copy or something similar. I want yours. I want the one you have, even if I already have one or many.

3. Lust: I have to have it.

4. Anger: I will hurt you to ensure that I have it, and and to ensure that you do not have one.

5. Envy: I hate that you have one.

6. Greed: There is no end to how much I want, or to how little I want you to have in comparison.

7. Sloth: I am opposed to you moving up the ladder: it means that I will have to move up the ladder, to keep my position of lordship over you. If I have twice as much as you do, and you gain a rung, that means I can only regain my previous lordship by moving up two; it is far easier to knock you back a rung, or to prevent you from climbing at all.

Destruction is easier than construction.

This becomes even more obvious for the person who has a goal of being 10 or 100 times further up the ladder of success. . .given the old, and hopefully obsolete, or soon to be obsolete, definitions of success.

"If I worked like a fiend all my life to ensure I had
a thousand dollars for every dollar you had, and then
someone came along and wanted to give everyone $1000,
then I would be forced to work like a fiend again, to
get another million dollars to retain my position."

Think about it: someone spends a lifetime achieving, creating, or otherwise investing their life, building a talent, an idea, or a physical manifestation of the life they have led. . .the destruction of this is far easier than the construction. . .just as the building of a house is much more difficult, requires training, discipline, knowledge of the laws of physics to get a temperature and light balance suitable for latitudes, etc., etc., etc.

But nearly anyone can burn down a building, or a pile of books without a fraction of this kind of training.

People are used to lording it over others by building and writing certain items that reflect their lordship over themselves, their environments, and, last/least, over other people. If they were not engaged in power over themselves [self-discipline, education, etc,] or over their environments [food, clothing and shelter], then they have only other people to have control over and that is the problem. They don't want other people to have it easier than they did. "If I did it with the hard ways and tools of the past, then YOU would threaten me if you use some easier ways and tools the present has to offer, and I don't want to learn the new tools, since I have invested my whole life to the mastery of the old tools." I have literally met very highly placed souls in the system of higher education who have told me they will quit the system on the day they have to use email because it removes the control they used to have over physical meetings, phone calls and the paper mails. It is just too obvious if a big wig is not answering your email, since email programs can actually tell you the second it was delivered and also the second the person "opened" it.

This is why SOME people fear the new Internet: other people fear it NOT because they lose the kind of lord position that comes with OWNERSHIP; rather they fear, in a similar manner, they will lose the CONTROL which they have used to achieve their position of lordship, such as one kind of professor mentioned below.

*****As Hart's DOS prompt sometimes states:*****

"Money is how people with no talent keep score!"
"Control is how others with no money keep score!"

These Seven Deadly Sins, while named by various names and by most civilizations, have nonetheless often been actual laws; in that certain people were required, by law, to be victims of the rest of their populations in that a person might be legally denied ownership of any property, due to racism or sexism, or denied the right to a contract, even legally denied the ability to read and write, not just an assortment of rights to vote, contract and own property— there have even been laws that forbade any but the "upper crust" to wear certain types of clothing, a "statement of fashion" of a slightly different order than we see today, but with similar ends.

You might want to look up laws that once divided this and other countries by making it illegal to teach any persons of certain races or genders reading, writing, arithmetic, and others of the ways human beings learn to have a power over their environments.

Power over oneself is the first kind of power…if you do not control yourself, you will find difficulty in control of anything.

Power over the environment is the second kind of power… if you do not control food, clothing and shelter, you are going to have a hard time controlling anything else.

Power over other human being is the third kind of power— described above in the Seven Deadly Sins, a third raters' kind of power. Those who cannot control anything else… must, by definition, have others control things for them. If they don't want to depend on the voluntary cooperation of others, then they must find some way to control them.

We are now seeing the efforts by those who couldn't BUILD the Internet to control it, and the 40 million people who are on it; people from the goverment to big business, who feel "Freedom Is Slavery" or at least dangerous; and, who feel the Internet is the "NEXT COMMERCIAL FRONTIER" where customers are all ready to be inundated with advertising, more cheaply than with junkmail. Fortunately some of the other Internet pioneers have developed ways of preventing this sort of thing from happening BUT I am sure we aren't far from lawsuits by the cash rich and information rich, complaining that they can't get their junkemail into "my" emailbox. We will probably all be forced to join into an assortment of "protectives" in which we subscribe to such "killbots" as are required to let in the mail we want and keep out the junkemail.

These same sorts of protectives were forming a century or so before the Internet, in a similar response to the hard monopolistic pricing policies of the railroads which went transcontinental just 100 years before this Internet did.

I suggest you look up Grange in your encyclopedias, where one of them says:

"The National Grange is the popular name of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, the oldest general farm organization in the United States. . .formed largely through the efforts of Oliver Hudson Kelley, a Minnesota farmer who was deeply affected by the poverty and isolation of the farmers he saw will inspecting farm areas in the South for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1866. In the 1870's the Grange was prominent in the broader Granger movement, which campaigned against extortionate charges by monopolistic railroads and warehouses and helped bring about laws regulating these charges. . . . Although challenged, the constitutionality of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Munn v. Illinois (1877).

[1994 Grolier Electronic Enyclcopedia]

***

The Internet Conquers Space, Time and Mass Production

The Internet is a primitive version of the "Star Trek Communicator," the "Star Trek Transporter," and, also a primitive version of the "Star Trek Replicator."

The Internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the Earth, as long as they, too, are on the Internet.

The Internet "let's" you transport anything you would be able to get into your computer to any Netter.

The Internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from "The Mona Lisa" to "The Klein Bottle" if you use the right "printer."

Don't forget the "SneakerNet" is part of the Internet and let's you get information to or from those who do not have direct Internet connections. SneakerNet was a term developed to describe the concept of sending a file to someone nearby the person you wanted, and the person would then put on his/her sneakers and run the disk down the street for you. From my experience, it was incredibly obvious that SneakerNet traversed from East to West and West to East around the world before the Internet did, as I received letters from the East and West as the Project Gutenberg Alice in Wonderland Etext circled the globe long before the Internet did.

This is very important to know if you consider that a possible future development might keep you from using the Internet for this, due to socio-political motions to turn the Internet into a "World Wide Mall" [WWM] a term coined specifically to describe that moneymaking philosophy that says "Even if it has been given away, free of charge, to 90% of the users for 25 years, our goal is to make sure we change it from an Information Superhighway to an Information Supertollway.

I said "let's" you do the Star Trek Communicator, and Transporter, and Replicator functions because it will soon be obvious that those "Information Rich" who had free access to the Internet for so long want to do an Internet Monopoly thing to ensure that what was free, to the Information Rich, will no longer be free for a class of the Information Poor.

This is serious business, and if you consider that it would cost the 40 million Netters about $25 per month to "subscribe" to the Information Rich version of the Internet, that means one thousand million dollars per month going into the hands of the Information Rich at the expense of the Information Poor; we would shortly be up to our virtual ears in a monopoly that would be on the order of the one recently broken up in a major anti-trust and anti-monopoly actions against the hand of the telephone company.

Hopefully, if we see it coming we can prevent it now, but it will take far more power than I have.

People will tell you "No one can own the Internet!"— but the fact is that while you may own your computer, you do not "Own the Internet" any more than owning my own telephones or PBX exchanges means I own telephone networks that belong to The Telephone Companies. The corporations that own the physical wires and cabling, they are the ones who own the Internet, and right now that system is being sold to The Telephone Companies, and your "rights" to the Information Superhighway are being sold with them.

The goal of giving 10,000 books to everyone on Earth, which we at Project Gutenberg have been trying to do, virtually since the start of the Internet, is in huge danger of becoming just another tool for those we are becoming enslaved by on the Internet, and these books might never get into the high schools: much less the middle schools and grade schools because the Trillion dollars we spend on educations with the rise and fall of every Congress of the United States isn't meant to educate, it is meant for something else. After all— if a Trillion dollars were really being spent on this process of education every two years, should literacy rates have plummeted to 53% and college level testing scores fallen for many straight years?

[Oh yes, I heard yesterday's report the tests were up for the first time in decades. . .but what I did NOT! hear was ANY reference to the fact that the score was "inflated" not only by the "normal" free 200 points a person gets for just being able to sign their names— but by an additional 22 points for math, 76 verbal.] [Written February 5th, 1995]

This kind of "grade inflation" has been going on in a similar, though less official manner, in our schools, for decades. There are schools in which the averages indicate more "A"s are given out than all other grade points combined, not just more "A"s than "B"s or "B"s than "C"s. Some of the most importanted studies were never published, even though they were tax funded.

Watch out, the term "grade inflation" is "politically incorrect" to such a degree that it does not appear a single time in any of the encyclopedias I have tried, although it does appear in my Random House Unabridged and College Dictionaries, but not the Merriam-Webster Ninth New College Dictionary, American Heritage or in any other references I have searched. Please tell me if you find it in any.

"The awarding of higher grades than students deserve either to maintain a school's academic reputation or as a result of diminished teacher expectations." [1980-1985]

I can personally tell you this was a huge concern in 1970-1975 when the average grade at some colleges in question had already passed the point mentioned just above, yielding averages including all undergraduate courses, including the grades of "flunk-outs," still higher than a "B" which means more "A"s were given a whole undergraduate student body than "B"s and "C"s. [Actually it means worse than that, but point made.]

So, we reached the point at which large numbers of a nation's high school graduates couldn't even read or fill out a minimum wage job application form, while, on paper, we were doing better than ever, excepting, thank God, the fact that testing scores showed there was something incredibly wrong, and businesses would notice they were having to interview more people for a job before they could find someone to fill it.

This is what happens when we separate a country into the
"Information Rich" and the "Information Poor."

Don't let it happen to the entire world.

For the first time in ALL history, we have the chance to ensure that every person can put huge amounts of "Public Domain" and other information into computers that should be as inexpensive as calculators in a few more years. I would like to ensure these people actually have material to put in those computers when they get them.

Example:

Some Shakespeare professors believe that the way to be a great Shakespeare professor is to know something about a Shakespeare play or poem that no one else knows.

Therefore they never tell anyone, and that knowledge can quite possibly die with them if it is never published in a wide manner. Example: Damascus steel was famous, for hundreds of years, but the knowledge of how to make this steel was so narrowly known that all those who knew that technique died without passing it on, and it was a truly long time before computer simulations finally managed to recreate Damascus steel after all those centuries when a person had to buy an antique to get any.

Some other Shakespeare professors believe that the way a person should act to be a great Shakespeare professor is to teach as many people as possible about Shakespeare in as complete a manner as they want to learn.

The Internet is balancing on this same dichotomy now….

Do we want Unlimited Distribution…

Or do we want to continue with Limited Distribution?

The French have just given us one of the great examples: a month or so ago [I am writing this in early February.] they found a cave containing the oldest known paintings, twice as old as any previously discovered, and after the initial month of photographing them in secret, placed an electronic set of photographs on the Internet for all of us to have. . .ALL!

This is in GREAT contradistinction to the way things had been done around the time I was born, when the "Dead Sea Scrolls" were discovered, and none of you ever saw them, or any real description of them, until a few years ago— in case you are wondering when, I was born in 1947; this is being published on my 48th birthday when I officially become "old." [As a mathematician, I don't cheat, and I admit that if you divide a 72 year lifespan into equals, you only get 24 years to be young, 24 years to be middle aged, and 24 years to be old. . .after that you have the odds beaten. If you divide the US into young and old, a person has to be considered "old" at 34, since 33 is the median age [meaning half the people are younger than 33, and half the people are older. The median Internet age? 26. Median Web age 31. Some predictions indicate these will decrease until the median Internet age is 15.

Who will rule the Internet?

Will it be the Internet Aristocrats…

or an Internet Everyman?

The difference is whether the teacher or scholar lording it over others is our example, or the teacher or scholar who teaches as well and as many as possible. We SAY our people should have and must have universal education yet with test scores and literacy rates in a tailspin it can obvious that we have anything BUT a widest universalness of primary and secondary education program in mind. Not to leave out college education, which has been known for the graduation of people who were totally illiterate.

For the first time we actually have an opportunity for a whole world's population to share not only air or water, but also to share the world of ideas, of art or of music and other sounds. . .anything that can be digitized.

Do you remember what the first protohumans did in "2001" [the movie by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark] ?

They chased their neighbors away from the water hole.

Will let the Thought Police chase us away from this huge watering hole, just so they can charge us admission, for something our tax dollars have already paid for?

The Internet Conquers Space, Time and Mass Production…

Think of the time and effort people save simply by being able to consult a dictionary, an encyclopedia, thesaurus or other reference book, a newspaper or magazine library of vast proportions, or a library of a thousand books of the greatest works of all history without even having to get up and go to the bookcase.

Think of the simple increase in education just because a person can and will look up more information, judgements become sharper and more informed….

Unless someone believes that good judgement, an informed population, and their effects are their enemies, it is a difficult stretch to understand why certain institutions and people want to limit this flow of information.

Yet a great number of our institutions, and even some of the people who run them, are against this kind of easily available information…they either want to control it— or they want to maintain their "leadership" in fields of endeavor by making sure we "have to do it the hard way," simply because they did it the hard way.

There is no longer any reason to "do it the hard way" as you will see below, and on the Internet.

End of the Preface to "A Brief History of the Internet."

Chapter 0

Introduction

Michael Hart is trying to change Human Nature.

He says Human Nature is all that is stopping the Internet from saving the world.

The Internet, he says, is a primitive combination of Star Trek communicators, transporters and replicators; and can and will bring nearly everything to nearly everyone.

"I type in Shakespeare and everyone, everywhere, and from now until the end of history as we know it—everyone will have a copy instantaneously, on request. Not only books, but the pictures, paintings, music. . .anything that will be digitized. . .which will eventually include it all. A few years ago I wrote some articles about 3-D replication [Stereographic Lithography] in which I told of processes, in use today, that videotaped and played back fastforward on a VCR, look just like something appearing in Star Trek replicators. Last month I saw an article about a stove a person could program from anyhere on the Internet. . .you could literally `fax someone a pizza' or other meals, the `faxing a pizza' being a standard joke among Internetters for years, describing one way to tell when the future can be said to have arrived."

For a billion or so people who own or borrow computers it might be said "The Future Is Now" because they can get at 250 Project Gutenberg Electronic Library items, including Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon in the same year the Internet was born.

This is item #250, and we hope it will save the Internet, and the world. . .and not be a futile, quixotic effort.

Let's face it, a country with an Adult Illiteracy Rate of 47% is not nearly as likely to develop a cure for AIDS as a country with an Adult Literacy Rate of 99%.

However, Michael Hart says the Internet has changed a lot in the last year, and not in the direction that will take the Project Gutenberg Etexts into the homes of the 47% of the adult population of the United States that is said to be functionally illiterate by the 1994 US Report on Adult Literacy. He has been trying to ensure that there is not going to be an "Information Rich" and "Information Poor," as a result of a Feudal Dark Ages approach to this coming "Age of Information". . .he has been trying since 1971, a virtual "First Citizen" of the Internet since he might be the first person on the Internet who was NOT paid to work on the Internet/ARPANet or its member computers.

Flashback

In either case, he was probably one of the first 100 on a fledgling Net and certainly the first to post information of a general nature for others on the Net to download; it was the United States' Declaration of Independence. This was followed by the U.S. Bill of Rights, and then a whole Etext of the U.S. Constitution, etc. You might consider, just for the ten minutes the first two might require, the reading of the first two of these documents that were put on the Internet starting 24 years ago: and maybe reading the beginning of the third.

The people who provided his Internet account thought this whole concept was nuts, but the files didn't take a whole lot of space, and the 200th Anniversary of the Revolution [of the United States against England] was coming up, and parchment replicas of all the Revolution's Documents were found nearly everywhere at the time. The idea of putting the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Bible, the Q'uran, and more on the Net was still pure Science Fiction to any but Mr. Hart at the time. For the first 17 years of this project, the only responses received were of the order of "You want to put Shakespeare on a computer!? You must be NUTS!" and that's where it stayed until the "Great Growth Spurt" hit the Internet in 1987-88. All of a sudden, the Internet hit "Critical Mass" and there were enough people to start a conversation on nearly any subject, including, of all things, electronic books, and, for the first time, Project Gutenberg received a message saying the Etext for everyone concept was a good idea.

That watershed event caused a ripple effect. With others finally interested in Etext, a "Mass Marketing Approach," and such it was, was finally appropriate, and the release of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan signalled beginnings of a widespread production and consumption of Etexts. In Appendix A you will find a listing of these 250, in order of their release.

Volunteers began popping up, right on schedule, to assist in the creation or distribution of what Project Gutenberg hoped would be 10,000 items by the end of 2001, only just 30 years after the first Etext was posted on the Net.

Flash Forward

Today there are about 500 volunteers at Project Gutenberg and they are spread all over the globe, from people doing their favorite book then never being heard from again, to PhD's, department heads, vice-presidents, and lawyers who do reams of copyright research, and some who have done in excess of 20 Etexts pretty much by themselves; appreciate is too small a word for how Michael feel about these, and tears would be the only appropriate gesture.

There are approximately 400 million computers today, with the traditional 1% of them being on the Internet, and the traditional ratio of about 10 users per Internet node has continued, too, as there are about 40 million people on a vast series of Internet gateways. Ratios like these have been a virtual constant through Internet development.

If there is only an average of 2.5 people on each of 400M computers, that is a billion people, just in 1995. There will probably be a billion computers in the world by 2001 when Project Gutenberg hopes to have 10,000 items online.

If only 10% of those computers contain the average Etexts from Project Gutenberg that will mean Project Gutenberg's goal of giving away one trillion Etexts will be completed at that time, not counting that more than one person will be able to use any of these copies. If the average would still be 2.5 people per computer, then only 4% of all the computers would be required to have reached one trillion.

[10,000 Etexts to 100,000,000 people equals one trillion]

Hart's dream as adequately expressed by "Grolier's" CDROM Electronic Encyclopedia has been his signature block with permission, for years, but this idea is now threatened by those who feel threatened by Unlimited Distribution:

===================================================== | The trend of library policy is clearly toward | the ideal of making all information available | without delay to all people. | |The Software Toolworks Illustrated Encyclopedia (TM) |(c) 1990, 1991 Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.

=============================================

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois—UIUC
hart@uiucvmd.bitnet and hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu

Internet User Number 100 [approximately] [TM]
Break Down the Bars of Ignorance & Illiteracy
On the Carnegie Libraries' 100th Anniversary!

Human Nature such as it is, has presented a great deal of resistance to the free distribution of anything, even air and water, over the millennia.

Hart hopes the Third Millennium A.D. can be different.

But it will require an evolution in human nature and even perhaps a revolution in human nature.

So far, the history of humankind has been a history of an ideal of monopoly: one tribe gets the lever, or a wheel, or copper, iron or steel, and uses it to command, control or otherwise lord it over another tribe. When there is a big surplus, trade routes begin to open up, civilizations begin to expand, and good times are had by all. When the huge surplus is NOT present, the first three estates lord it over the rest in virtually the same manner as historic figures have done through the ages:

"I have got this and you don't." [Nyah nyah naa naa naa!]

*** ***

Now that ownership of the basic library of human thoughts is potentially available to every human being on Earth—I have been watching the various attempts to keep this from actually being available to everyone on the planet: this is what I have seen:

1. Ridicule

Those who would prefer to think their worlds would be destroyed by infinite availability of books such as: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables or the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Milton or others, have ridiculed the efforts of those who would give them to all free of charge by arguing about whether it should be: "To be or not to be" or "To be [,] or not to be" or "To be [;] or not to be"/"To be [:] or not to be" or whatever; and that whatever their choices are, for this earthshaking matter, that no other choice should be possible to anyone else. My choice of editions is final because I have a scholarly opinion.

1A. My response has been to refuse to discuss: "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin," [or many other matters of similar importance].

I know this was once considered of utmost importance, BUT IN A COUNTRY WHERE HALF THE ADULTS COULD NOT EVEN READ SHAKESPEARE IF IT WERE GIVEN TO THEM, I feel the general literacy and literary requirements overtake a decision such as theirs. If they honestly wanted the best version of Shakespeare [in their estimations] to be the default version on the Internet, they wouldn't have refused to create just such an edition, wouldn't have shot down my suggested plan to help them make it . . .for so many years. . .nor, when they finally did agree, they wouldn't have let an offer from a largest wannabee Etext provider to provide them with discount prices, and undermine their resolve to create a super quality public domain edition of Shakespeare. It was an incredible commentary on the educational system in that the Shakespeare edition we finally did use for a standard Internet Etext was donated by a commercial— yes—commercial vendor, who sells it for a living.

In fact, I must state for the record, that education, as an institution, has had very little to do with the creation and distribution of Public Domain Etexts for the public, and that contributions by the commercial, capitalistic corporations has been the primary force, by a large margin, that funds Project Gutenberg. The 500 volunteers we have come exclusively from smaller, less renowned institutions of education, without any, not one that I can think of, from any of the major or near major educational institutions of the world.

It would appear that those Seven Deadly Sins listed a few paragraphs previously have gone a long way to the proof of the saying that "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Power certainly accrues to those who covet it and the proof of the pudding is that all of the powerful club we have approached have refused to assist in the very new concept of truly Universal Education.

Members of those top educational institutions managed to subscribe to our free newsletter often enough, but not one of them ever volunteered to do a book or even to donate a dollar for what they have received: even send in lists of errors they say they have noticed.

Not one. [There is a word for the act of complaining about something without [literally] lifting a finger]

The entire body of freely available Etexts has been a product of the "little people."

2. Cost Inflation

When Etexts were first coming it, estimates were sent around the Internet that it took $10,000 to create an Etexts, and that therefore it would take $100,000,000 to create the proposed Project Gutenberg Library.

$500,000,000 was supposedly donated to create Etexts, by one famous foundation, duly reported by the media, but these Etexts have not found their way into hands, or minds, of the public, nor will they very soon I am afraid, though I would love to be put out of business [so to say] by the act of these institutions' release of the thousands of Etexts some of them already have, and that others have been talking about for years.

My response was, has been, and will be, simply to get the Etexts out there, on time, and with no budget. A simple proof that the problem does not exist. If the team of Project Gutenberg volunteers can produce this number of Etexts and provide it to the entire world's computerized population, then the zillions of dollars you hear being donated to the creations of electronic libraries by various government and private donations should be used to keep the Information Superhighway a free and productive place for all, not just for those 1% of computers that have already found a home there.

3. Graphics and Markup versus Plain Vanilla ASCII

The one thing you will see in common with ALL of such graphics and markup proposals is LIMITED DISTRIBUTION as a way of life. The purpose of each one of these is and always has been to keep knowledge in the hands of the few and away from the minds of the many.

I predict that in the not-too-distant-future that all materials will either be circulating on the Internet, or that they will be jealously guarded by owners whom I described with the Seven Deadly Sins.

If there is ever such a thing as the "Tri-corder," of Star Trek fame, I am sure there simultaneously has to be developed a "safe" in which those who don't want a whole population to have what they have will "lock" a valuable object to ensure its uniqueness; the concept of which I am speaking is illustrated by this story:

"A butler announces a delivery, by very distinguished members of a very famous auction house. The master— for he IS master—beckons him to his study desk where the butler deposits his silver tray, containing a big triangular stamp, then turns to go.

What some of these projects with tens of millions for their "Electronic Libraries" are doing to ensure this is for THEM and not for everyone is to prepare Etexts in a manner in which no normal person would either be willing or able to read them.

Shakespeare's Hamlet is a tiny file in PVASCII, small enough for half a dozen copies to fit [uncompressed!] on a $.23 floppy disk that fits in your pocket. But, if it is preserved as a PICTURE of each page, then it will take so much space that it would be difficult to carry around even a single copy in that pocket unless it were on a floppy sized optical disk, and even then I don't think it would fit.

Another way to ensure no normal person would read it, to mark it up so blatantly that the human eyes should have difficulty in scansion, stuttering around pages, rather than sliding easily over them; the information contained in this "markup" is deemed crucial by those esoteric scholars who think it is of vital importance that a coffee cup stain appears at the lower right of a certain page, and that "Act I" be followed by [<ACT ONE>] to ensure everyone knows this is actually where this is where an act or scene or whatever starts.

You probably would not believe how much money has had the honor of being spent on these kinds of projects a normal person is intentionlly deprived of through the mixture is just plain HIDING the files, to making the files so BIG you can't download them, to making them so WEIRD you wouldn't read them if you got them. The concept of requiring all documents to be formatted in a certain manner such that only a certain program can read them has been proposed more often then you might ever want to imagine, for the TWIN PURPOSES OF PROFIT AND LIMITED DISTRIBUTION in a medium which requires a virtue of UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION to keep it growing.

Every day I read articles, proposals, proceedings for various conferences that promote LIMITED DISTRIBUTION on the Nets. . .simply to raise the prestige or money to keep some small oligarchy in power.

This is truly a time of POWER TO THE PEOPLE as people say in the United States.

What we have here is a conflict between the concepts that everything SHOULD be in LIMITED DISTRIBUTION, and that of the opposing concept of UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION.

If you look over the table of contents on the next pages, you will see that each of these item stresses the greater and greater differences between an history which has been dedicated to the preservation of Limited Distribution and something so new it has no history longer than 25 years—

***

Contents

Chapter 00

Preface

Chapter 0

Introduction

Saving Time and Effort

The New Scholarship

Chapter 1

General Comments

Plain Vanilla ASCII Versus Proprietary Markups