Accounting in clay
The first written records are not poems but accounts: how much grain, how many sheep. Writing grew out of the need to manage property and trade, much as the first computers were later built to do calculations.
The alphabet
The Phoenicians introduced letters for sounds instead of thousands of signs for words. Their alphabet gave rise to the Greek and Latin alphabets and to Cyrillic. Chinese writing, however, has kept its thousands of characters to this day.
Glagolitic
Constantine (Cyril) created a script of its own for the Slavic language: Glagolitic. Together with his brother Methodius he brought it to Great Moravia in 863. Old Church Slavonic became the third liturgical language alongside Latin and Greek.
Digital writing
Today's computers store text using Unicode, an encoding that contains the characters of almost every language in the world, including Glagolitic and emoji.