[Overview]
When Project Gutenberg began in July 1971, the internet was not even
born. On July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United
States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the
mainframe he was using. In upper case, because there was no lower case
yet. But to send a 5K file to the 100 users of the embryonic internet
would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where the eText
was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still
20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. The internet was born
in 1974 with the creation of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol /
Internet Protocol) by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It began spreading in
1983. It got a boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and of the
first browser in 1993. At the end of 1997, there were 90 to 100 million
users, with one million new users every month. At the end of 2000,
there were over 300 million users.