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  • Gutenberg Bible printed (23-2-1455)

    From Ross Clark@21:1/5 to All on Sat Feb 24 11:57:36 2024
    OK, OK. "Various dates have been suggested, but this is the one most
    widely accepted."

    And what exactly happened on that date? Bible printed, bound and offered
    for sale (or presented to a prince or bishop)? The whole process of
    producing a book like that would surely have taken at least weeks.

    Crystal offers as a _terminus ante quem_ a letter from Aenias Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) to Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, dated
    12-3-1455; but this refers only to P having seen (at Frankfurt) "several sheets" of a printed Bible -- "with such neat lettering that Carvajal
    would be able to read it without his glasses!"
    Aha. Wikipedia has more: "...he had seen pages from the Gutenberg Bible displayed in Frankfurt to promote the edition, and that either 158 or
    180 copies had been printed."

    Doesn't matter. This was the first complete printed Bible (Crystal) and
    the earliest major book printed in Europe (Wikipedia). The Big Bang of
    the Age of Print.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible

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  • From Aidan Kehoe@21:1/5 to All on Sat Feb 24 09:51:28 2024
    Ar an ceathrú lá is fiche de mí Feabhra, scríobh Ross Clark:

    [...] Doesn't matter. This was the first complete printed Bible (Crystal) and the earliest major book printed in Europe (Wikipedia). The Big Bang of the Age of Print.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible

    Part of my education involved computational linguistics at the turn of the millenium, the first AI winter, and after that experience I am not certain that the current AI spring with its hallucinatory Ferris Buellers will change everything in the way its hype men assert. (The number of contexts where there is no need for accountability at all is actually fairly limited!)

    But there are contexts where recent AI will make things practical that would currently be unreasonable drudgery (e.g. the recent deciphering of papyri from Herculaneum), and that will change things in the way that printing changed western society. Great to be around for its beginning.

    --
    ‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
    How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
    (C. Moore)

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