Historical Roots
The first Project Gutenberg eBook was created on July 4, 1971. Michael S. Hart had been granted access to a powerful mainframe computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and realized that his greatest impact would be by digitizing and distributing free literature (for more history, see: The eBook is 40 (1971-2011), by Marie Lebert).
Michael took a printed copy of United States Declaration of Independence to the computer laboratory, where he sat at the teletype terminal and typed this first eBook. He distributed it via email to the people he knew about via the Internet’s predecessor, ARPAnet, which was available at UIUC. At that moment, the first eBook had been freely distributed to the online community of the day.
Digitization and production techniques, at the time of this first eBook, were ad hoc and informal. A single eBook producer would edit a single file, from a single source. The first eBook’s printed source was a single sheet of paper, without hyphenation, a book cover, images, or other characteristics of book-length sources. In 1971, capitalization was not an issue, as only upper case letters were available in the character set used by the system.
Figure 1: Top view of a Model 33 Teletype, salvaged from the computer laboratory where Michael Hart typed the first eBook. The paper roll was where output would be printed.
Model 33 Teletype
During the next twenty years, from approximately 1971-1991, techniques of digitization would be dramatically improved, and regularized. Ongoing developments since then have tracked the available technologies for eBook creation and use, as well as preferences and interests of the many volunteers who would produce those eBooks. Throughout the history of Project Gutenberg, these techniques, while refined and clearly articulated, have remained flexible (see the Volunteers’ FAQ)