Provenance of the Qu'ran

This is a brief outline of the chain of events that has turned the spoken word of Muhammad into the written work we have today, and the pathway through which people have then come to interpret it.
The only sources of information on this question come from Islamic historians, with a little input from manuscript analysis.

Qu'ran Timeline

570 Birth of the Prophet : Muhammad is born in Mecca (Saudi Arabia)
610 Private Islam : Muhammad begins his mission to spread Islam privately in Mecca amongst chosen individuals
613 Public Islam : Muhammad opens his mission publically
622 Move to Medina : Muhammad is forced out of Mecca and moves to Medina, 450 km away
632 Ascension of Muhammad - Muhammad passes from this world to the next
The Muslim community is left with a huge number of scattered fragments of Qu'ranic sayings: some oral, some written, some complete, some incomplete, some accurate, some imperfectly remembered/written. (For writing in those days was a very new and error-prone art of a few people.)
632-634 First Orthodox Caliph - Abu Bakr
633 First Qu'rans - One of the first of many attempts at writing down the Qu'ran is made.
With those who knew the Qu'ran orally mostly dead, some traditions suggest that the first caliph (Abu Bakr) took up the idea of making a written Qu'ran.
This Qu'ran owned by Abu Bakr was assembled by a prominent Qu'ran reciter (Zaid), and became just one amongst the various different Qu'rans produced by other equally prominent Qu'ran reciters, which differed in content through choice and wording of verses, and had them different order.
It is portrayed as a fairly private attempt for the first Caliph, and appears consequently to have become the official copy used by the Caliphs for their own personal reference. It appears not to have been publicised either then or after. After Abu Bakr, it was handed down to the second Caliph (Umar), after whom it was kept in the indefinite possession of his reclusive daughter Hafsah (a widow of Muhammad).
634-644 Second Orthodox Caliph - Umar
644-656 Third Orthodox Caliph - Uthman
653 Standardising the Qu'ran - Implementation of a single Qu'ran to recapture unity in Islam
Many versions of the Qu'ran were in existence across the Islamic lands, assembled by the prominent memorisers of the Qu'ran. They had different and variant surahs and verses, and were unintendedly causing religious diversity, controversy and stress.
Sometime during the end of the third caliph's reign, a committee compiled the original version of what was later to become the present day Qu'ran; Zaid's Qu'ran was borrowed from Hafsah for the purpose, and after its creation, copies were sent out, ordering all other versions of the Qu'ran to be destroyed, so that just this one should remain. This earned Uthman the title 'The Book burner', and was part of the reason he was assassinated shortly after.
Hafsah held onto her Qu'ran and protected it from the burning until her death in 667 AD, when it was destroyed by order of the current Caliph.
656-661 Last Orthodox Caliph - Ali
700 Alphabet Enlargement - The alphabet of the Qu'ran is changed in a major way.
The script of the original Qu'rans used only 17 characters to represent 28 consonants, and had no vowels. This obviously led to problems with people reading the Qu'ran in quite different ways, and so around 700 AD, the alphabet of the Qu'ran was expanded from 17 to 28 characters and vowels added, to fix the interpretation of the Qu'ran into a certain reading.
An analogy would be if in English, the same letter were used for both c and for s, and there were no vowels; then (s/c)t could mean any of 'sit', 'sat', 'seat', 'cat', 'cot', 'cut' and so forth - and then to imagine the language was altered, so that all the varying interpretations of (s/c)t were eliminated through a change of script, making 'cot' with no other possibility, thus transforming the original text into an interpretion.
786 Script Style Changed - The new characters that had been adopted in 700, themselves led to considerable confusability, and so were in turn changed and finalised around 786. This system has been generally used since the early 11th century.
850 Oldest Full Qu'ran - The oldest existing full copy of the Qu'ran, from analysis, is from the ninth century. (There are earlier fragments of Qu'ran.)
Muslims are often led to believe that two of the Qu'rans of Uthman are still in existance today, in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) and Topkapi Museum (Istanbul), claiming for both (and for many other Qu'rans besides!) that they display the blood of Uthman as he held it in his hands and was assassinated; others deny this, pointing to their script and style being from centuries later, along with various other arguments.
It's probably fair to say that, whilst the two Qu'rans in question are early, to hold any view on the matter is going far beyond the evidence. Like belief in whether the Turin shroud, before its dating, was the actual shroud of Christ or had a later existence, people's varying views are more to do with what they would like to be the case, rather than any reasonable assessment of the matter.
Thus there are today no Qu'rans in existence that can be claimed to be the originals made by Uthman; and this fits in with how Al-Kindi, writing in 830 AD, recounts how all but the copy sent to Damascus became destroyed, with this Damascan copy itself generally being agreed to have been lost.
1000 Chosen Texts - a ninth-century Muslim scholar from Iraq wrote a book entitled The Seven Readings, in which he selected seven different textual versions of the written Qu'ran as the best transmitted and most authoritative, which he traced to the authority of seven reciters who died, broadly speaking, in the latter half of the 8th century. Others texts subsequently became disfavoured and even opposed.
These different texts have differences of the base letters, vowelations and consonantal interpretations (differences in grammatical indicators, consonants, nouns - whether singular, dual, plural, masculine or feminine - substitution of one word for another, reversals of word order in expressions where the reversal affects the meaning in the Arabic, small additions or deletions in accordance with the custom of the Arabs, other dialectical peculiarities); the variants of what are known as the Ten Readings impact about two-thirds of the verses of the Qu'ran through different vowelings etc, although the effect on doctrine is mostly insubstantial. Three of these Texts eventually prevailed over a large area.
1924 Standard Edition - the version of the text as used around most the world today.

The Oral Qu'ran

The Qu'ran is referred to in the Qu'ran itself, where it is described as an unassailable guide to the path of God.
From the fact that the word "Qu'ran" means recitation, and by thinking about how it was delivered orally by Muhammad to the people, who memorised and internalised its words and meaning, then it is clear that the "Qu'ran", and its attendant descriptions, refer not to the written version of the Qu'ran assembled by man after Muhammad's passing or the versions possessed by muslims today, but rather to a "Book" of a non-written character.
Several different possibilities spring immediately to mind, as to what "Qu'ran" might have meant:

A similar example can be found in Christianity, where the gospel refers to the message conveyed by Christ, rather than its later written form as books.
Depending on what you take "Qu'ran" to mean, you will come to different conclusions; but if you were an illiterate Arab living in Muhammad's time, and you heard Muhammad speak of the Qu'ran, "Qu'ran" would obviously mean to you the intervention of heaven in earth's affairs, the message being given, and the fact that God, not man, would prevail - rather than a compilation of people's memories made some while after Muhammad's death. 2007.02.01