The historical use of technology in the preparation and production of written documents

Reading newspapers, folders and catalogues, looking at posters, we do not stop to think how writing was shaped over centuries. It changed very slowly, supplementing consecutive stages of human evolution.
It is derived from memory signs, simple pictures.
These images were supposed to represent thoughts, ideas or e.g. important moments of social life. Drawings came before script , they gave foundations for its existence. For it is illustrative script containing pictures meant for free interpretation.

The most important reason why people started looking for something to write on, was the need to record signs and pictures. The development of such pictures and signs into writing was, in most cases dependant on the types of materials, which were available. The material, on which letters were written, made a hard and difficult way. The alphabet “went from stone to clay, from clay to papyrus, from papyrus to wax tablets, from wax tablets to parchment, parchment to paper”. Letters passing from one material to another continually changed the way they looked. The primitive man had to make his workshop from anything he was able to find. He had: stones, bones, leaves, clay pots, animal skins, bark and the largest then available “sheets of paper” – cave walls. As history shows, the first writing “tools and materials” turned out to be very good, as many of those writings survived till today. In Mesopotamia cuneiform writing was founded as a result of pressing signs with bamboo sticks on wet clay tablets, which were then dried out in the sun. The writing was about making vertical and horizontal lines, one beside the other, which resulted in various meanings.
Dependant on the type of line that was to be obtained, three types of chisels:
- triangular – to draw angles
- furrowed – to create nails
- rounded – to write numbers
The Greeks as well as the Romans did not like this way of writing, for them the tablets were too heavy. That is why they found a different surface. Wooden tablets covered with wax, sometimes mixed with tar in order to give them a darker shade and framed turned out to be much lighter. Rylecs, which looked like large nails, were used to write on the tablets. They were most often made of metal, wood or hard cane. The great advantage of this way of writing was that you could write on the tablet again after rubbing off the layer of wax. One tablet could not fit enough text that is why they were tied together through holes made in the frame. Two connected together tablets are called diptych, three – triptych, more than three – poliptych. A collection of tablets connected together resembled a tree trunk – caudex, that is where the name of the later form of book, came from.

The most common writing material that ancient Egyptians used, was stone. Hieroglyphic inscriptions were engraved on the temple walls, on statues, urns with sharp chisels.
In the meantime Egyptians also “had an idea” to create writing material from a plant called papyrus. The stalks were cut into thin strips and were placed in layers crosswise. These layers were then beaten with a wooden hammer and the secreted juice stuck them together. When writing on the papyrus rolls, the writers used thin cane brushes or feathers. Black ink was made from charcoal or soot and the colored one from minerals grinded into a powder and mixed with water.
Egypt monopolized production and trade of papyrus, which brought it great profit. However, the large demand caused, despite the great plantations, a lack of plants in the Nile valley. They, thus started looking for something to replace the papyrus. Parchment was invented . Parchment very quickly forced out the common before papyrus. It was produced from the skins of various but mostly young animals. Calf, sheep and goat skins were mainly used. It was dressed leather – with no fur, scraped, and thoroughly rinsed but untenned –, the so called nakedness, which was usually subject to a range of different operations , like e.g. repeated dipping, soaking with plant substances, polishing, rubbing in various substances or even dyeing.
The Chinese made their strange, but full of grace and lightness signs with the aid of brushes made of flexible bristle connected with a silk thread. The most popular writing materials were: wood, bamboo, bones until they came up with the idea of producing paper. As many inventions around the world, paper was discovered by accident. The Chinese discovered that after rinsing the silk cotton, a thin coating is left on the mats, which can be used for writing after it dries. Because silk was very expensive, it was replaced, in time, with plant fibers (e.g. mulberry) and linen cloth. Tsai Lunow supposedly invented these elements used to produce paper about 105 a.d. Paper mass is composed of fibers crushed and pressed into thin sheets. It was produced by reusing cloth, later plant fiber and other substances (e.g. old fishermen nets) were added. The new material became popular very quickly after it was introduced to the Caesar. The secret of producing paper was guarded for over 700 years.
The best paper is obtained from plants with a lot of cellulose in fibers, or from cloth made of natural materials. Paper has been known for almost 19 centuries and is one of the most common used products in the world.

Printing
The process of popularizing information by rewriting texts by hand was time consuming and expensive. The reproduction of texts with the aid of mechanical methods was a significant change. Printing with the aid of wooden blocks, on which, using the technique of wood engraving, the mirror reflection of the text was placed, was known in China in the II century a.d. The first printed book comes from Korea from 704. The work was printed using printing blocks – all the letters were cut out on a wooden plates. The process was improved. The first book printed with a mobile type was in Korea in 1234. It consisted of 50 volumes and was issued in 28 copies. The development of printing techniques in Asia was stopped by the great language difficulty, which complied of a few thousands of signs. The invention of print in Europe took place independently and was preceded by using wood engraving text copying techniques. The oldest print of a mobile type in Europe is the only remaining copy of nine pages of German text with a calendar printed by Gutenberg in Mainz probably in 1454. The most popular issue is, considered the pioneer work, 42-line Gutenberg Bible. It has 643 pages, it was printed in about 165 copies. From the 48 copies existing today, some were printed on paper and some on parchment.
The composition took even a few months but the process was still shorter and was cheaper than rewriting by hand or block printing. The press was operated by two: one person operated the press and spread the paint, the second put on and took off paper. The oldest prints, called incunabula and initials were painted by hand. During the renaissance period books left the printing-office in the form of brochures – stapled together and without any binding. The decoration and the binding was left for the buyer. At the end of the XV century there were a few hundred printing-offices in Europe and a few dozen millions of books hit the market. Multicolored print started to be used over time. Gutenberg’s invention was one of the most important innovations of the renaissance period. The many times improved, manual choice of individual letters survived until linotype was invented at the turn of the XIX century.
At the turn of the XIX century, the so far manual production of books, started to change into mechanical and industrial. In 1814 a high-speed printing machine driven by a steam machine, was used. Lithography became commonly used. In 1847 a rotational printing machine was patented. During the second half of the XIX a breakthrough in the technique of composition took place. The linotype – a mechanical device used to put together fonts, was invented in 1884, and three years later, the monotype was introduced. Modern ways of preparing printing plates were introduced. The first offset machine was produced in 1904. Modern printing has been revolutionized by computers. The text is edited on the screen and then transferred onto discs (very rarely plates), which are used to produce printing forms.

WORD-PROCESSOR (WORD)
The first version of Word, for DOS, appeared in 1983, it was offered on one 5.25 inch floppy disk; during the first year 8000 copies of the program were sold. In 1989 Word 1.0 for Windows was introduced, also known as WinWord.
The last Word version for DOS without the graphic interface, was Word 5.5; It had the scrolled down groups of menu commands, dialogue windows and help systems. It has two working modes: graphic, where all the text attributes are displayed, and the faster, text. The macro command language is built-in here. It is possible to use columns and tables. There are editing functions for longer documents and editorial work, such as bookmarks, indexes, footnotes and text change symbols.
Word 2.0 was said to be an easy to use program, its possibility to work with many documents was stressed. It was very prone to adaptation by the user: it was possible to transfer menu commands or change their names, change icons in the tool bar, key combinations assigned to commands, activate macro commands from the menu or the tool bar. Additional modules used to create mathematical equations, graphs, vector graphics were introduced. The tool bar with icons, already known from the Excel 3.0 spreadsheet of the same company, was an innovation.
Script and its permanence is unquestionable, even at the very moment, dear reader, you are reading a script. It will serve us for a very long time. Its usefulness is great, life in the modern world would not be possible without it, newspapers, Internet, advertisements, product packaging, they are all based on script.