Article - Interview With Michael Hart

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Interview with Michael Hart
Published on 9/6/97

Netpanel took the opportunity to interview Michael Stern Hart, Executive Director of the volunteer-based Project Gutenberg. This project, which was designed with the belief "that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries." Read on further in this exclusive article to find out more about Michael Hart and Project Gutenberg. Our questions will appear in italics, followed by his responses.

Netpanel: Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Michael Hart: I try to keep myself out of the Project Gutenberg spotlight. There are 1,000 volunteers who help us, and they should get most of the credit. I am happy to talk about inventing Etext [Electronic Text] and the like, and I will be putting a lot about myself on my home page at promo.net next month, after we post Etext #1,000, but I prefer to keep myself in the background, as much as possible, because I don't want Project Gutenberg to be too dependent on me, as an individual. I want it to continue after me.

NP: How did you get involved in computers and the Internet?

MH: My best friend and my brother's best friend both happened to be mainframe operators on the same computer, and I used to sneak into the computer (whole rooms, back then) to do my homework where it was comfortable, quiet, well lit, etc. You have to remember that back around July 4th, 1971, it was VERY hot, and there wasn't much air-conditioning, and the dorms, libraries, and study rooms were often noisy, hot, or otherwise not great study places.

I was electronically oriented due to my dad being a hi-fi nut, any my mom being involved in the mathematical explosions back in the 50's and 60's, and I figured out how to run that computer just by watching what was going on around me. One day things were VERY busy, and a favorite user came to the stainless steel prayer booth wanting to run a program and all the usual operators were too busy, and he was in a BIG hurry, so I asked everyone if I could run the program for him.

They were all kind of surprised, and asked me if I knew how. I described the process of loading and running, and they said sure, give it a try. The program ran, everyone was happy, and from then on I was an unofficial member of the priesthood.

Later on I received an official account with $100 million in it, and they just told me to play around with the computer. That was the beginning of Project Gutenberg. . .I typed in the Declaration of Independence and posted it. We had just gotten on the Internet, so it was natural for all the sites to download it. It was probably the first piece of general information posted on the Internet.

I am often asked how I decided to do something as strange as put books on the Internet as far back as 1971, when computers were only thought of as huge behemoths either for super high-tech solutions to problems, or tools of the administrative bureaucracy for "folding, spindling, and mutilating" the citizenry.

As usual, the truth is much simpler than it appears. My parents were people of very wide interests, and I picked up on math, science, and electronics, as well as literature, music and the arts. Besides several other full careers, mom was a professor of math education, and dad was a Shakespeare professor, so the idea of putting the Complete Works of Shakespeare into a computer was not as much of a leap for me as it would have been for others.

NP: Give us a background and explanation of Project Gutenberg, in which you are involved.

MH: I look at Project Gutenberg as the first example of the Neo-Industrial Revolution, in which any person can enter anything into a computer, and billions of computers users all over the world can have a copy tomorrow. I look at this completely differently than the Post-Industrial Revolution in which people want to do virtually no work, yet have monopoly power over all the products they can.

Etexts are the first thing in the history of the world, besides air, that there is enough of for everyone to have all they want.

This is UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION. . .in a civilization that has always been based on LIMITED DISTRIBUTION. It is going to shake things up more than you can imagine, which is why they are trying to pass laws all over the world to copyright everything, and for longer than a human lifetime.

They can't stand the idea of a completely literate and educated public, even though they politicize that this is what they want.

Actions speak SO much more loudly than words.

ANY college or government could have done SO much more for Etext than Project Gutenberg has. . .if they really wanted to educate the public. . .but they didn't.

We have lived so long with Limited Distribution, virtually forever, that the paradigm change to Unlimited Distribution is a shift that most people cannot yet understand, or accept, either.

NP: Where can we learn more about Project Gutenberg?

MH: We have sites all over the world, promo.net is our central site.

NP: You were one of the first users of the Internet. What was it like then?

MH: Total geekspeak. . .no one other than the geekiest would ever want to read what was on the Internet then. Mostly about what to do when your computer crashed, where the repair guys were, etc. I guess I was the first person who saw the Internet as something more than a place to swap information of an extremely narrow high-tech nature.

This was back in 1971, at the height of the computers folding, spindling, and mutilating their users, and everything was research on new materials, orbital mechanics, etc.

They thought I was nuts wanting to put Shakespeare in the computer, which would have filled up either of the hard drives, and a little more. It is hard to understand that the two hard drives on those huge computers could have each been filled up with single files such as Shakespeare and the Bible that millions of people can download every day today.

NP: What are your views on the Internet now, and how is it progressing with the World Wide Web continually growing and becoming the most popular aspect of the Internet?

MH: I agree with the philosophy that the Internet is becoming something with "a sixth grade reading level and an MTV attention span." With the same space as most of the pictures, sounds, etc., you could download a Shakespeare play.

I was dumbfounded that students could graduate from extremely prestigious liberal arts universities without ever reading a Shakespeare play in their whole lives. We read Shakespeare plays in junior high school (middle school, these days), and read more Shakespeare in high school, and college. I think the "well rounded education" is becoming a thing of the past, and hope that the efforts of Project Gutenberg will go a long way towards reviving the trend of general literacy, as opposed to our universities becoming "trade schools." I think we need both.

The Internet COULD be the greatest educational tool of all history, but they are trying to pass laws to keep all the great books of the last CENTURY off the Internet. At the beginning of this century, copyright was mostly 14 years, with only the best sellers being renewed to 28 years. Now they want to pass copyrights that would mean something published now would still be illegal to copy when it was as far in the future as the Wright Brothers are now in our past.

Can you imagine what it would be like if the blueprints to the Wright Brothers’ airplane were still copyrighted? Information Age? For whom? Only for those who can afford it.

The really sad thing about the new copyright extensions, besides the fact that the break a "contract with America" is that they take away millions of books worth of information from the masses so that the publishers can keep monopolistic printing of perhaps only one out of a thousand of them. If you think of a lifetime of access to a book as worth on a dollar, then they are taking away hundreds of trillions of dollars in public domain access, just so a few multimillionaires can each get another million. Not a tradeoff in the general interest of the whole country, just in the self-interest of a few of the very, very wealthy, who have already made fortunes on books they did not write, edit, or originally publish.

I prefer to educate the masses, but the elite want to stay elite, and to keep information close to the vest. They say: "It's not enough for US to win, YOU have to lose."

NP: Thank you for your time. To our readers, for further reading on Project Gutenberg and Etext, we highly recommend you visit http://www.promo.net .