On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Sonja van Baardwijk-Holten wrote:
> Patrick Schlichtenmyer schreef:
>
> > Well, my personal vote would have to go to Gutenberg's Printing Press.
> > Within the last 500 years it has revolutionized the world in which we
> > live in a way that would have been unlikely otherwise.
>
> Didn't the Chineese have a printing press a long time before Gutenberg?
They did have some sort of printing press, but I don't think they had
movable type; I think I've heard that it was the movable type that made
for the revolution in printing as much as anything else. (All you have to
do to set up a page is take your letters and put them in the frame in the
right order, and then begin printing, as opposed to carving out the stuff
for each new page.)
I could be off, though. :) Anyone who knows better, correct me if I'm
wrong.
Julia
