To give you an estimation of the difference in the original and what we
have today: the original was probably entered on cards commonly known
at the time as “IBM cards” (Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate) and
probably took in excess of 100,000 of them. A single card could hold 80
characters (hence 80 characters is an accepted standard for so many
computer margins), and the entire original edition we received in all
caps was over 800,000 chars in length, including line enumeration,
symbols for caps and the punctuation marks, etc., since they were not
available keyboard characters at the time (probably the keyboards
operated at baud rates of around 113, meaning the typists had to type
slowly for the keyboard to keep up).
This is the second version of Paradise Lost released by Project
Gutenberg. The first was released as our October, 1991 etext.
