{"id":14636,"date":"2022-06-28T19:35:06","date_gmt":"2022-06-28T18:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=14636"},"modified":"2022-06-28T20:04:42","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T19:04:42","slug":"printing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=14636","title":{"rendered":"Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Gutenberg printing press really took off as a mainstream device around 1480 (542 years ago!)<\/strong>, by which time there were 110 presses active in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Bohemia and Poland. Within 50 or 60 years of the invention of the printing press, the entire classical canon had been reprinted and widely promulgated throughout Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the mechanics of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press were still essentially unchanged, although new materials in its construction, amongst other innovations, had gradually improved its printing efficiency. The steam-powered rotary printing press, invented in 1843 in the United States by Richard M. Hoe (no, really)<\/strong>, ultimately allowed millions of copies of a page in a single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The practice of postal communication, sending written documents that were carried by an intermediary from one person or place to another almost certainly dates back nearly to the invention of writing. However, the development of formal postal systems occurred much later. The first documented use of an organized courier service for the dissemination of written documents is in Egypt, where Pharaohs used couriers to send out decrees throughout the territory of the state (2400 BCE). The earliest surviving piece of mail is also Egyptian, dating to 255 BCE (that’s too far back for me to calculate)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1971 (that’s 51 years ago!)<\/strong> the first ARPANET computer network (e)mail was sent. Proprietary electronic mail systems soon began to emerge. IBM, CompuServe and Xerox used in-house mail systems in the 1970s; CompuServe sold a commercial intraoffice email product from 1978 and IBM and Xerox joined the market with their email products from 1981.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1976 (46 years ago!)<\/strong>, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman first described the notion of a digital signature scheme, although they only conjectured that such schemes existed based on functions that are trapdoor one-way permutations. The first widely marketed software package to offer digital signature was Lotus Notes 1.0, released in 1989, which used the RSA algorithm. In 1988, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Ronald Rivest became the first to rigorously define the security requirements of digital signature schemes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, here we are, in the 21st Century, and a company I have a private pension with needs to send me (by email!) a three-page letter which I have to print out, then I have to fill in boxes and tick other boxes on all three pages, then I have to sign it with an actual pen, and then put it in the post back to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s the very definition of pathetic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Gutenberg printing press really took off as a mainstream device around 1480 (542 years ago!), by which time there were 110 presses active in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":14637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}