Take some pulverized plant pulp, stir in water, lift out a thin layer with a screen, press and dry, and we have just made paper! A split reed and lampblack in water and tree gum gives us pen and ink. With these we can write. You could use it for extending your thinking space. To communicate ideas. To spread them.
Next came printing press.
The printing press came up with an inexpensive and efficient way to make type, make the ink sticky
Most interesting insight.
The computer and the Internet require manufacturing technologies and infrastructures far beyond those needed for paper, pens, ink, and the press. We would hope that they can give us back enough more than paper and printing to be worth all the effort.
The Internet part of this dream was to simultaneously be the press, the post, and the libraries for this new media.
This dream is happening, but slowly, because most computer users are "driving faster and faster into the future, but steering only by looking in the rearview mirror"
Worse, the advent of WWW browsers for the Internet disastrously turned users into simple consumers, because the browsers do not permit any kind of balanced authoring for Internet content. That this was allowed to happen is almost beyond belief and has been a terrible setback.