Before that, the academics were producing editions of renaissance and baroque music in giant tomes which didn't fit on a music stand. So in order to have your recorder group play it, you had to copy it out as many times as you needed for eveyone to see it, which took more commitment than most people have to music they've never heard before. Now, if you want to try a piece, you xerox the right number of copies. Email makes the worldwide hospitality network function much more smoothly. The existence of various music publishing tools makes it much easier to produce an edition of a given piece of music when there are no published ones, or they don't meet your needs.
Instrument makers love computer graphics and tuning tools.
Below are some links which I hope will be helpful in exploring this subject. Please feel free to email me if you know of others which should be here. It had been discussed on the rec.music.early newsgroup some time before I got internet access. It was a while before I found anything else on the web as good as the Vatican Library site. The Music Hall of the Vatican Library site has some very beautiful Renaissance manuscripts on display.