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Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and reused.
by cperciva 4y ago
Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and reused.
- zwirbl 4y agoA reused manuscript page is called a palimpsest and often the scraped off text can be recovered. Some of Archimedes writings actually survived this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
- unwind 4y agoObligatory shout-out to the novella of the same name, by HN user (and, obviously, Actual Author) Charles Stross. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella)
- dmurray 4y agoAnd wax tablets, slates, etc. Pedantically, I suppose neither these nor parchment is really paper.
- anamexis 4y agoI don't think that was their point. If you went to a bank in the 1940s and made a withdrawal, they wouldn't pull your account slip, erase the balance, and write in the new one. They would add a new line to the ledger noting a new balance. This is by design.
- WalterBright 4y agoDouble-entry bookkeeping was a great advance.
- ezekiel68 4y agoAnd -- in keeping with the flow of this thread -- a complete luxury until the implements (paper/pens/tape/disk/silicon) would become abundant and ubiquitous.
- WalterBright 4y agoPaper and ink were good enough for centuries.
- dTal 4y agoPaper especially was very expensive until approximately the 19th century.
- WalterBright 4y agoThe explosive growth in the printing industry suggests otherwise.
- ezekiel68 4y agoWe are simply pointing out there was a time when the surface one could write on was so precious, people used to cover previous works and re-use it instead of obtaining new ones (vellum, etc). So -- you're not wrong about the explosive growth. We're just pointing out the abundance of even writing instruments occurred at a certain point in history.
- itsmartapuntocm 4y agoMore recently, movie studios regularly destroyed old film to make space for new ones, causing old pictures, especially silent era ones, to be lost forever. Even NASA wiped the original Apollo 11 tapes to reuse them.
- helf 4y agoThis enrages me every time I see it. It's even worse with old broadcast TV, Especially daily serials/soaps. Shit is probably gone forever because the tapes were immediately wiped and reused. >:( I know a lot of it stemmed from space and budget constraints but the complete lack of forward thinking everyone seems to have drives me bonkers. I'm glad the Internet Archive exists. This current digital only future is terrifyingly ephemeral. I really wish someone would give the Archive a massive, multi-billion endowment to guarantee it surviving for decades of operation with no forthcoming income.