. . . and now for something completely different: the last typewriter plant shuts down.

Story here.  Commercial typewriters hit the market after the Civil War and they reached a standard configuration by 1910 or so. The impact on the practice of law was enormous (e.g., no longer did it make sense to have legal apprentices copy out documents by longhand, the amount of text that could be economically produced exploded, it facilitated the rise of the female secretary at the law firm, etc.)  I know that some scholar recently wrote a paper on the impact of the text's medium (stone, paper, bytes) on law itself but I cannot find it.  I'll finish with an anecdote. When I began working as a messenger and copy-boy at the family law firm in 1974, the secretaries typed out wills on 14 inch, single spaced pages, and no typos or cross-outs were permitted.  They would head off to a quiet room to type a will and you'd sometimes hear a scream of frustration as they hit a single wrong key somewhere near the bottom of the 14 inch page.