The archive was created in 1990 by a person — known only by his Internet tag, Zodiac — who started archiving Marxist texts by transcribing the works of Marx and Engels into E-text, starting with the "Communist Manifesto". In 1993 the accumulated text was posted on a gopher site at csf.colorado.edu. Volunteers joined and helped spread and mirror the main archive. However, the main site and its mirrors were hosted on academic servers and by the end of 1995 almost all had been shut down.