OK, OK. "Various dates have been suggested, but this is the one most
widely accepted."

And what exactly happened on that date? Bible printed, bound and offered
for sale (or presented to a prince or bishop)? The whole process of
producing a book like that would surely have taken at least weeks.

Crystal offers as a _terminus ante quem_ a letter from Aenias Silvius
Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) to Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, dated
12-3-1455; but this refers only to P having seen (at Frankfurt) "several
sheets" of a printed Bible -- "with such neat lettering that Carvajal
would be able to read it without his glasses!"
Aha. Wikipedia has more: "...he had seen pages from the Gutenberg Bible
displayed in Frankfurt to promote the edition, and that either 158 or
180 copies had been printed."

Doesn't matter. This was the first complete printed Bible (Crystal) and
the earliest major book printed in Europe (Wikipedia). The Big Bang of
the Age of Print.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible

Ar an ceathrú lá is fiche de mí Feabhra, scríobh Ross Clark:

> [...] Doesn't matter. This was the first complete printed Bible (Crystal)
> and the earliest major book printed in Europe (Wikipedia). The Big Bang of
> the Age of Print.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible

Part of my education involved computational linguistics at the turn of the
millenium, the first AI winter, and after that experience I am not certain that
the current AI spring with its hallucinatory Ferris Buellers will change
everything in the way its hype men assert. (The number of contexts where there
is no need for accountability at all is actually fairly limited!)

But there are contexts where recent AI will make things practical that would
currently be unreasonable drudgery (e.g. the recent deciphering of papyri from
Herculaneum), and that will change things in the way that printing changed
western society. Great to be around for its beginning.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)