Michael Stern Hart was the man we all have to thank for the Guttenberg Project. This is a quote from his well penned obituary on the project site.  Salient and pertinent as we head to BBC’s WDYTYA 2012 Live Show it made me pause and think not only about his achievement and sadly too short life, he was only 64 when he died last year, but the purpose and fascination of our ongoing interest passion and enthusiasm for history.

The relevance of credited quote from George Bernard Shaw made me think about why we all pursue a better understanding of our history, perhaps to better understand ourselves and with the hope we can then be more informed and hopefully a little more enlightened in helping the next generations to make the best of what is to come…what a gift and legacy he left for us all 

“A lifetime intellectual, Hart was inspired by his parents, both professors at the University of Illinois, to seek truth and to question authority.

One of his favorite recent quotes, credited to George Bernard Shaw, is characteristic of his approach to life:

 "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.  Unreasonable
 people attempt to adapt the world to themselves.  All progress,
 therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

You can learn a little about this quite remarkable and relatively unsung hero of free access at The World Public Library Community Blog. If ever there was a reason for archiving the net, the loss to the world of characters like Michael Hart and Steve Jobs have to be meaningful examples. History being made quite fast, we must not miss it and lose it. Here are the writings in his own word’s you can almost hear him speaking…

Thanks to Michael Hart and his family you can still enjoy his writings here and the Guttenberg lives on for the benefit of all of us, thankfully.