Today in 1971, Michael Hart entered the United States’ Declaration of Independence into the mainframe he was using, all in upper case, because there was no lower case yet on the mainframe’s keyboard.
Hart recalled in 2009:
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.
To send a 5 Kilobyte file to the 100 users of the embryonic internet would have crashed the network, so Hart told them where the eText was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the Web was still 20 years ahead). The first document in what will become Project Gutenberg was downloaded by six users.