Source: Wikimedia Commons
Ask an American over fifty why cursive went away and you will hear that children type now. Ask a teacher and you will hear something more specific and…
No screen, no undo, a bell that rang early, and no number one. Here are twelve.
1. There Was No Screen, So the Paper Was the Only Record
This is…
There is a common assumption that sealing a letter was about privacy, and it misses what the object was for.
A seal provides no privacy whatsoever. Anybody determined to read…
There is a difference between two ways of putting a mark on a surface, and almost everything about the history of writing materials follows from it.
The first is to…
The number of signs a writing system requires is not a technical detail. It determines who can be literate.
A system with several thousand signs can be learned, and learning…
Scripts are usually classified by what a single character represents: a sound, a syllable, a consonant, or a whole word. Almost every design choice below follows from that decision. Here…