Everyone, In a prior message this afternoon I noted that the first mention of the phrase "Project Gutenberg" in Google Groups appeared in 1987, and had nothing to do with the PG we know. It was used internally by the Atari Corporation to describe a new laser printer. I asked Art Morgan, who headed up that project, and whose name is associated with the 1987 message, to clarify what he wrote, and why he chose the name "Project Gutenberg", which I know everyone here will relate to. With his permission, he said: "Yes, I personally came up with the name since I was team lead on the SLM804 project. We didn't assign the product a model number until fairly late in its development. I had to give a "sneak peek" talk on it, so I dubbed it Project Gutenberg. In 1987, Apple had the only true desktop publishing system around, way before HP started selling laser printers for PCs and commoditized them. Unfortunately, Apple's laser printer was a computer in itself, and they had to charge a premium for this redundancy. "Atari's CEO, Jack Tramiel, gave us the edict to create a laser printer "for the masses, not the classes". I came up with the idea to have the host system perform all the RIP (raster image processing) functions of the printer, and just "pump" the final bitmap image of the page to the printer. This would require only a "dumb" laser printer engine to get the job done. The Atari ST was the perfect printer host - it was based on the Motorola 68000 and had gobs of memory - exactly the platform found in Apple's laser printers. "It was easy to talk to Adobe to port their code to the ST since it was developed on the same 68000 platform. But, to lower the costs further, we went with a PostScript clone from Imagen, and a printer engine from TEC (not Canon). Anyway, we should have patented the whole lot because NeXT later used the host-based laser printer idea for their system, and now Dell offers one for PCs. "Why did I pick Gutenberg? Gutenberg's moveable type technology enabled the printing of low-cost bibles and brought the word of God to everyone, just as Atari's unique RIP technology brought desktop publishing to the masses ..." (In a followup reply, Art mentioned:) "Sorry to admit it, but I didn't know about Michael Hart until you told me about him. He sounds like quite a visionary fellow - like Ted Nelson or Alan Kay. "Feel free to use my text - I'm honored and flattered! Take care!" For those interested... Jon