Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. He subsequently typed in the "Declaration of Independence" which heralded the era of electronic text documents.

I stumbled across the project a few years ago and visited it as recently as two years ago when I downloaded The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. I'm delighted to say that the book was much, much better than the musicals based on it.

The project converts old books that have been cleared of their copyright statuses into plain vanilla ASCII text files which can be ready by 99.9 percent of the computers in the world.

Please take some time to visit Project Gutenberg. You'll be glad you did.