Book People Archive

Re: Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar...


> In a message dated 1/12/2006 5:33:46 PM Mountain Standard Time,
> jon@[redacted] writes:
>
>>> hart@[redacted] writes:
>>
>>>> In addition, he refers to my work on Project Gutenberg as an
>>>> "experiment."
>>
>> Sigh. I did not say this.
>>
>> Jon

Here is the paragraph in which "experiment" appears:

"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.)"

Perhaps you were quoting someone else without using quotation marks,
and I inadvertently attributed the word "experiment" to you, and if
so, My Sincere Apologies.

Michael

[Moderator: This was covered in an earlier post which might not
 have reached Michael in time for his reply.  Basically, Jon Noring
 says he did write that paragraph, but that "experiment" was only
 intended to apply to the 1971 keypunching of the Declaration,
 not to Michael's Project Gutenberg work in general.  Full message at

    http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive/?year=2006&post=2006-01-12,5

 - JMO]