Five hundred years ago we had been whacked in the chops by an enormous technological shift, make no mistake. The social order hadn't been unthreaded quite yet, but it was about to be turned inside-out. Fifteen million books had been flung into a world where scholars would travel miles to visit a library stocked with twenty hand-written volumes. And it'd all happened in 42 years or a little more. Let's see if we can put that in perspective.