Write 1.0: The First Age of Writing

Since the beginning of time, man has communicated in various forms. One of the most prevalent of these forms is the written word, which has been around for thousands of years. And for these thousands of years, various forms of paper and ink (what we are calling Write 1.0) was the medium for theses written words. This enabled man to take the verbal stories that had been passed down from generation to generation and set them to paper. 

This also enabled copying, with more than one copy becoming available. This served as a perfect form of long distance communication, as one message could now get passed quickly and efficiently from man to man and reach the intended recipient untouched and unchanged. However, this written form of copying was a long and arduous process, taking years for even the most accomplished copiers to complete a single book. Enter the printing press.

 Gutenberg obviously saw this as a problem, and he determined that he wanted to make the process more streamlined, so that printing could be available to the masses. Namely, he wanted the public to have access to the Bible, so that they could read the contents for themselves, and not have to rely on it being read to them by corruptible papal figures. This was a revolution, as people now had access to all the information that before had only been accessible to a chosen few. We can call this the first information age, as we now live in the second and far greater information age. 

With the printing press, people were free to copy whatever they desired (and could afford), making daily newspapers possible and skyrocketing the number of existing readers and writers.  This also made possible "best selling books," starting out with shorter versions of religious books to keep the costs low, and then eventually turning into books like Pilgrims Progress and Robinson Crusoe, which were both highly published around the world. The costs of publishing books were then lowered during the industrial revolution, and people were able to afford longer books, thus making it possible for the Bible to become the best selling book of all time. 

With all these ideas and stories being created, people began to demand an even more streamlined version of the printing press. This, coupled with the fact that hand writing a book is a slow process and painful (literally), facilitated the advent of the typewriter. This machine allowed for people to have the power of creating a finished document in their own home. They even became portable, with the grand exception being the Chinese Typewriter, which some call the precursor to the modern day computer, due to the complexity of the 2,500 character machine. 

However, as humans do, we craved even more innovation. We needed something more. We wanted to be able to easily edit our documents and we wanted to write them even faster. This desire to innovate and improve led to the word processor, and to the second age of writing: Write 2.0.