True, most of the time. Historically invention might spread fairly quickly in urban areas and rural areas much longer. It depends on the invention too. Indoor plumbing and electricity for example- in Europe and much of America, up to the end of WW2 it wouldn’t have been too odd to have grown up without those things.
Even after ww2 for decades, in certain regions and such not having indoor plumbing especially wouldn’t have been so shocking to most.
So it can take years or decades or even generations for inventions to “catch on,” the first digital computers were invented in the late 1930’s-1940’s depending on how you define things, but most people weren’t familiar with computers in their lives until the 1980’s at least and it wouldn’t be until the late 1990’s that they were even common enough that most homes had them or you’d assume naturally most people you met used a computer at home or work.
The printing press is of course a rather large, complex, specialized piece of equipment. So there isn’t a point in history until the maturation of affordable home computer printer technology that your average person owned or even had much access to these machines. I assure you that years, decades, centuries after the printing press was invented “people in the 1XXX’s” were still likely writing things out by hand. It would be quite some time after the invention of the printing press that the technology reached a point where it was feasible for the average person to have access to it- and for much of the history of the press it was still an operation where the type needed set by a specialist and then the machines needed to either be ran by a printer or later on mass presses could run “automatically” once set but required technical staff to tend their operation.
The printing press never caught on for “the people” as far as using it to print really, outside of organizations, because it was best suited to large runs. The amount of effort was similar to print a single copy as a hundred, so it wasn’t cost effective or time efficient to use for most personal matters.
Devices like typographers and later typewriters and word processors came later around the 1800’s and gave small organizations and some individuals access to self printing of damper scale documents like correspondence and records. Mechanical printing on a device like what we might call a “printer” also came about around the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the 1930’s that dry printing ink technology would come along to make more modern self printing practical. The first comercial “printers” akin to what we know today came along around the 1960’s but were still rare. By the 1980’s “dot matrix” printing had become the dominant computer printing format and computers were still rare as..
.. well as printers in most homes, but there were plenty of homes that had them. The average person could have access and was likely to encounter than places like their work or in schools and such.
So it took quite some time for printing technology to reach the individual person and become even remotely part of day to day life as far as being able to easily or affordably print things themselves. Most of the history of printing technology is comprised of printers being large specialized machines that just didn’t lend themselves to usage by the common person.
Even after ww2 for decades, in certain regions and such not having indoor plumbing especially wouldn’t have been so shocking to most.
So it can take years or decades or even generations for inventions to “catch on,” the first digital computers were invented in the late 1930’s-1940’s depending on how you define things, but most people weren’t familiar with computers in their lives until the 1980’s at least and it wouldn’t be until the late 1990’s that they were even common enough that most homes had them or you’d assume naturally most people you met used a computer at home or work.
Devices like typographers and later typewriters and word processors came later around the 1800’s and gave small organizations and some individuals access to self printing of damper scale documents like correspondence and records. Mechanical printing on a device like what we might call a “printer” also came about around the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the 1930’s that dry printing ink technology would come along to make more modern self printing practical. The first comercial “printers” akin to what we know today came along around the 1960’s but were still rare. By the 1980’s “dot matrix” printing had become the dominant computer printing format and computers were still rare as..
So it took quite some time for printing technology to reach the individual person and become even remotely part of day to day life as far as being able to easily or affordably print things themselves. Most of the history of printing technology is comprised of printers being large specialized machines that just didn’t lend themselves to usage by the common person.