Last year, at the 1999 EBook conference, Dick Brass of Microsoft outlined the history of reading; this history was essentially that of the improvements in the hardware material that humans write on and read from. But there is another, parallel, history of reading, and this other history of reading is the story of how humans have found methods to represent their spoken words with written symbols. In fact, the first writings -- these Sumerian logographs from 4000 BC -- did not symbolize speech at all, but were simply pictures of objects and activities.
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