The sad part is, most folks don’t know who he was. Michael S. Hart invented electronic books (now called eBooks) in 1971, when he typed the text of the free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence he had been handed into a plain ASCII text file and sent it over the net to his friends. In 1971 almost no-one knew there was a net, still decades away from evolving into the web, but even back then Mike realized it was a powerful tool for education and literacy, and he kept typing in and disseminating royalty free literature. He later went on to found the Gutenberg Project and became an advocate for both literacy and for the preservation of public domain rights and resources, all for the greater good of the human race. In case it wasn’t obvious by my statements, this is one of my heroes, and one of the giants who helped build today’s modern world of the future. He will be missed.
