...Information Technology Tales By expanding the sharing of knowledge, time after time InfoTech upset the balance of power within m... ...L For becoming my smart, beautiful bride in 1949 and then giving fully of herself to me and our wonderful family incomparable love, care, feeding... ...ove, care, feeding, fun, and friendship. Also for her perceptive editing of my copy over many decades, especially during the writing of this book.... ...ourish the Renaissance. 11. The Missing Keys to Science Chest Ancient Greece’s fear of the void blocked the advance of science for millennia, but... ...ia. 14. Printers as Agents of Change After the fall of Rome, Western culture focuses for centuries on guarding rather than expanding accumulate... ...) split geographically along a line that runs roughly from Scandinavia to Greece and almost touches the Black Sea. The eastward migration from t... ... just to learn to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Pictographic culture‘s rigorous nature, moreover, left priests and scribes with little ... ... for the four centuries before 1500 BC. Bringing together those different cultures must have made it obvious that they needed an easier way to commu... ...nters and gradually spread their alphabet‘s use to places as far-flung as Greece, Sicily, Italy, North Africa, southern Spain, and the British Isles...

...This book also begins with that wondrous first Information Technology and then moves on to tales about the wonders of the written word—great stories, many of them likely new to most readers. In them, you‘ll find all the backgrounds, foregrounds, premises, conclusions, and surprises that make up the best and most valuable books....

... listen. We easily hallucinate word boundaries. Spaces, such as you see in writing, are absent from speech. Yet somehow we find it easy to make sense of speech. -- 2. The Gift of Memory-For millennia, mnemonics reigned over commerce, news, entertainment, and the perpetuation and refinement of crafts. -- 3. From Whence Cometh Indo-European Tongues?-Did a freshwater lake com...