Book People Archive

Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar Bush; Asimov

Everyone,

In doing some research on ebook history, which naturally will
prominently include Project Gutenberg because of the obvious impact PG
and Michael Hart has had on etexts and ebooks, I'm trying to
reconstruct a fact database which includes the who, what, when, where,
why and how of the various seminal events.

So, I've just created a specialized Yahoo Group to collect/archive the
snippets of facts that come up:

   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-history/

You're welcome to join and post any information you know on ebook
history. Especially wanted is the pre-1990 period: commercial,
academic, and public (free). We should collect this information before
it is lost to the mists of time.


*****

Anyway, in doing research on what is found in the early Google
Groups archive on PG, Bowerbird recommended that I dig through
textfiles.com, which appears to have archived a large number of ASCII
texts that existed on various BBS systems of the 1980's and early
1990's (its coverage/completeness is unknown, however.)

So, focusing on the first "modern" classic book that PG issued,
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (text #11, officially released
01 Jan 1991), I dug through textfiles.com to see what they had.

The oldest copy I found there was "alice11.txt", Millenium Fulcrum
Edition 1.1, dated 1990 (by copyright claim.) See:

   http://www.textfiles.com/etext/FICTION/alice11.txt

That was issued in the very early era when PG was still affiliated
with Duncan Research. As an aside, it is interesting to note the huge
differences in that early text's boilerplate compared with the
present boilerplate. PG has evolved quite a bit in handling the legal
aspects (particularly copyright) of its texts, which is to be fully
expected. So this text is a nice historical reminder of how far PG
has come in the last 16 years.

I was hoping, though, to find a much older text version of "Alice".
Bowerbird stated his belief that Michael Hart keypunched Alice a lot
earlier than 1990/91, but so far I have not found that version,
assuming it was distributed and ended up in some BBS or online
archive.

So, Michael, if you're reading this, did you keypunch "Alice" well
before 1990, where did you distribute it, and does a copy exist
somewhere? That would truly be a historical work, especially if it
was "digiscribed" in the 1970's or early 80's (BBS systems began
maturing in the mid- to late-1980's.)

A question for others reading this: where else should I search for
information on digitized books placed on BBS in the 1980's? Were there
others besides Michael who "digiscribed" public domain books and texts
in the 1980's and placed them online? (I plan to dig through more of
the textfiles area to see what book texts are dated in the 1980's, if
any, and who did them.)

*****

Another interesting thing I discovered in my research -- and which some
of you undoubtedly know about -- is the "Brown Corpus":

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus

In the late-1960's, the partial/full texts of a variety of 500 works
published in 1961 were keypunched for computer use (a maximum of 2000
words for each work), totalling a little over 1,000,000 words. The
purpose was solely for lexicostatistics and not for direct reading.
For this purpose the Brown Corpus is quite famous (enough to rate its
own wikipedia article.)

Only a few years later, in 1971 Michael Hart keypunched into a
computer "The Declaration of Independence" for the purpose of
electronic "distribution" and direct reading by others, so Michael is,
as far as is now known, the first person documented to experiment with
electronic distribution of readable, published digital texts. (I plan
to contact the Brown Corpus people, if any are still alive, to see if
there were experiments at Brown, or elsewhere, on this in the 1960's.)

But nevertheless, to see major portions of published texts and books
being keypunched and processed by computers in the 1960's is truly
remarkable.

*****

Another really cool thing, I found a Usenet message from 1987 which,
in turn, is a fairly comprehensive description of an Atlantic Monthly
article written by Vannevar Bush in July 1945, entitled "As We May
Think". It is beyond amazing the insights Vannevar Bush had relevant
to ebooks, to elibraries (like PG's) and the role of individuals and
volunteers. Again, some of you have probably read Vannevar Bush's
article, but for those who haven't...

Usenet summary:

   http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.hypercard/msg/660f72a6e3b5f7a2?hl=en&

And the actual article is reproduced here:

   http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

*****

Finally, Mark Bernstein, the founder of Eastgate, which in 1987 issued
several contemporary hypertext fiction ebooks on floppy disk and
CD-ROM, mentioned to me Asimov's mid-50's book "Foundation" where
ebooks are implicit. Has anyone read this book and can comment on
Asimov's 1950's vision for ebooks?

Thanks!

Jon Noring