In 1998, the database of the first volume of the Encyclopedie (1751) was available online, as an experimental project from ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language), a common project of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - National Scientific Research Center) in France and the University of Chicago in Illinois (United States). This online experiment was a first step towards a full online version of the first edition (1751-1772) of the Encyclopedie by Diderot and d'Alembert, with 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors - including Voltaire, Rousseau, Marmontel, d'Holbach, Turgot, and others -, 17 volumes of text (with 20,736,912 words and 18,000 pages) and 11 volumes of plates. Designed to collect and disseminate the entire knowledge of the time, the Encyclopedie was a reflection of the intellectual and social currents of the time, called the Age of Enlightenment, and contributed to disseminate novel ideas that would inspire the French Revolution in 1789. April 1998 > The dream behind the web, by Tim Berners-Lee, its inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1990, wrote in May 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together" (excerpt from "The World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on the website of the World Wide Web Consortium). May 1998 > Editions 00h00, a pioneer in online publishing Editions 00h00 (pronounced "zero heure") was created in May 1998 by Jean-Pierre Arbon and Bruno de Sa Moreira, as a pioneer in commercial online publishing, to sell digital books through the internet. In 2000, the catalog included 600 titles, with 85% of sales for digital versions (in PDF format), and the remaining 15% for on-demand print versions. No stock, but a direct link with the reader and between readers. On the website, users/readers could create their personal space to write their comments, participate in forums, subscribe to an online newsletter, and watch online video clips about new literary works that were published. In September 2000, 00h00 was bought by the media company Gemstar. In June 2003, Gemstar put an end to its eBook experiments, both for its ebook reading devices and for 00h00. August 1998 > A quote by Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg