About Michael S. Hart
Michael Stern Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011) was an American author credited with the invention of the e-book, and who founded Project Gutenberg (PG), the first project to make e-books freely available via the Internet. He published e-books via ARPANET years before the Internet existed, and later on BBS networks and Gopher servers. Hart devoted his life after founding PG in 1971 to digitizing and distributing literature from works in the public domain with free and expired copyrights. The first e-books were typed in plain text format and published as text files; other formats were made available later. Hart typed most of the early e-books himself; later, volunteers expanded the project. Hart related that after his account was created on July 4, 1971, he wanted to "give back" by doing something that could be considered to be of great value.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.