Bible translation has always been painstaking, laborious work. It is not just the difficulty of the work itself; there are also the technical challenges translators face. In the old days each draft had to be typed manually—four or five times!—before the project was completed. And once the text had received final approval, the entire manuscript had to be re-typed by the typesetter before it could be printed.

The revolution started around the mid-1980s, when more and more translation projects began making use of the personal computer.

Thanks to the PC, a text had to be typed only once. After that, only the corrections needed to be entered and upon completion of the project, the text could be sent to the printer in digital format.

In those early days the software for typing and printing scripture files was designed almost exclusively by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International). SIL also produced tools enabling translators to type special characters, check punctuation and accents, and create word lists.