The claim was not about the medium, but about the content ("a 500 year old seeded-torrent"). Phone system has never stored any data (other than the mapping bet

The claim was not about the medium, but about the content ("a 500 year old seeded-torrent"). Phone system has never stored any data (other than the mapping between phone numbers and addresses or, lately, people), and was usually upgraded in a backwards-compatible way. I think that's the important nuance: humans have always had a keen interest in keeping records of history. We are at an early age of electronic computers, but we've already got things like archive.org — that's likely to persist in some shape or form, just like we are actively trying to persist books and movies from different eras. Other than natural or civilizational catastrophes, I only see the risk in the amount of data needing storage surpassing any one's entity ability to archive it, but I am sure "humans" would deal with that in due time too. Edit: I do not necessarily believe the torrent claim, but wanted to clarify why I see a point in it.