The History of Universality

Movable type consisted of individual pieces of metal, each embossed with one letter of the alphabet. Earlier forms of printing were merely stream lined writing in the same way that roman numeral counting each page was engraved on a printing plate. But given a supply of movable type, with several instances of each letter, one does no further metal work. One merely arranges the type into words and sentences. So this is just another example of universality in technology.