At some point you have to stop blaming Gutenberg for the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, and understand that what was birthed into being with the printing press was more momentous than the particulars of his Mainz workshop and what he did there.
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But he got there too late. After years of work and many thousands of guilders spent, the VCs sued and took the company from him (like so many defenestrated startup CEOs) right as the technology was reaching maturity. He'd never see the windfall his genius invention produced.
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What are the lessons to draw here? For starters, what we call the 'printing press' was actually a collection of technologies that came to fruition at the right time. Gutenberg had to source new kinds of paper, develop new inks, and invent the very notion of typefaces.
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Likewise, what we call 'the Internet' or 'Facebook' (or whatever) is really the magic combo of the TCP/IP routing layer, the hardware of smartphones, an addictive and adopted application layer, and ubiquitous wireless connectivity.
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I feel like this entire thread misses the point of the fun that was the Thirty Year’s War by identifying one invention that contributed to instigating it and ignoring the thousands that made it interesting.
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I mean, let’s face it. Dispatches during the war weren’t printed for the most part. Wartime communications were infinitely more interesting than polemics aristocrats, let alone mercenaries and the latest round of illiterate fodder couldn’t read or didn’t care to.
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