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A comment on Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?. Parent comment

Re:Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? by hinkley on Monday July 15, 2019 @07:28PM (#20446246)
It still blows my mind that they abandoned the printing press for aesthetic reasons, long before Gutenberg was born.

And bamboo really is a hell of a material. The breadth of vocational materials science they had was staggering.

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Re:Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? by marcosdumay on Monday July 15, 2019 @07:56PM (#20446392)
Well, their printing press wasn't nearly as useful as Gutenberg's. Mostly because of weak materials.

A printing press isn't as useful if you have to manually verify and fix the types ever other print.

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Re:Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? by Nasrudith on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @11:47PM (#20466519)
I had heard another other issue cited as a possible culprit - that their alphabet wasn't very suited to it given their vast number of characters not gaining as much.

It brings to mind one artifact of letter construction being based upon the writing method - cuneiform vs ink pen letters for instance.

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