1. In the beginning...

This chapter discusses what is meant by both technology and information, and goes on to discuss briefly the origins of language and of writing. The meat of the chapter is about the development of the alphabet as a system of writing, and the build-up to this development, indicating why it is such a special and important, though not obvious, invention. Then, the author moves on to the Arabic numbers, which is a roughly equivalent system of writing numbers, equally unobvious and equally important.