Perhaps their most important finding was also the most obvious. Some of Eliot's typescripts had marks all over them, marks which were known to be the notes of Ezra Pound, Eliot's champion in the U.S. and a well-known literary critic. He had made massive changes to the original manuscript. Example: that famous opener, "April is the cruellest month," used to be buried under a section some hundred lines long before Pound cut the whole thing. All told his edits shrunk the poem in half. As a result it became more cryptic, rhymed less, and in some ways mutated into a bleaker, more biting critique of the modern world.

Which is to say that Pound completely transformed "The Waste Land." And the scary thing is that we might have never known -- we might have lost our whole rich picture of the poem's creation -- had Eliot not been such a bureaucrat, typing up and shuffling around so many snapshots of his work in progress.

Fast-forward to the present day. Some people worry that with the advent of the word processor, early drafts of important work no longer survive. When a writer hits "Save" he creates a snapshot, sure, but a snapshot which overwrites his earlier work. So unless he's particularly conscientious, the only draft he'll end up with is the draft, the one he publishes.

Things started looking up 663 days ago, when the well-known entrepreneur and venture capitalist Paul Graham, on his popular social news site Hacker News, submitted a story with an atypically dramatic title: "The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad."

He linked to etherpad.com. The bulk of the page was taken up by a basic text editor, and on top of that a slider, the kind you might use to move through a song in iTunes or adjust the treble on your hi-fi. As you moved the slider the text changed.

Graham explained what you were looking at:

I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in classes where students write papers, because now you can finally "show your work" in writing the way you do in math.

Forget about saving drafts -- Etherpad promised (or threatened) to save every keystroke: every note and idea, every version of a phrase, every snag and breakthrough. It would all be recorded, and labeled, and automatically backed up as you typed.

Imagine the consequences. As Graham said, students using Etherpad in English class would in effect be "showing their work." It could do wonders for teaching. But that's nothing compared to the idea of our great poets and novelists using such a tool to record the minutiae of their creative process, the dynamic history of their work, and bequeathing it all to their readers. It'd be like Eliot letting us lean over his shoulder.