At first, there was thought
And that thought was expressed probably at about the same time verbally, in gestures and in drawings in early social settings of humans. Languages evolved to codify sharing of thoughts and the only "record" of past thoughts was oral history. The need for giving some permanence to thoughts gave rise to first types of writing which were pictorial, eventually to evolve into more abstract form of symbols and ending up with the purest form of such abstraction - written word in the form of an alphabet. The need for communication across distance of both time and space required a form of a display device for the written word that was more portable than caveside rock or walls inside of a pharaoh's tomb. First came the clay tablets and then papyrus and ultimately paper as display devices. In the history of thought, display device of paper or paper equivalent is just a tiny sliver of history and a temporary stage just like all the previous display devices. It is now being repla...