A Brief History of the Internet - Maxwell Fuller (the beginning after the end novel read TXT) 📗

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

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 insure 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:

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| 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.

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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.