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"Here's a 4000 year old letter from a merchant to his partners describing how to avoid taxes by smuggling goods in their underwear." ( https://www.britishmuseum

"Here's a 4000 year old letter from a merchant to his partners describing how to avoid taxes by smuggling goods in their underwear." ( https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/trade-and-contraband-ancient-assyria https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/trade-and-contraband-anci... ) vs "Not sure if it's possible to read this 30 year old file!"

kelnos 3y ago
I get the point you're trying to make, but your former example is rare. While there are more exceedingly-old paper records that are still around and have been preserved than we might expect, we've lost so, so much. Paper and ink (and variations on that) are both fragile. Digital documents are otherwise easy to preserve indefinitely, if care is taken up-front to choose a simple document format that is likely to remain parseable (or at least documented) for a long time. And even when you don't do that, there's always the possibility of writing a parser later (assuming documentation is around) or reverse-engineering the format. And in this case, the 30-year-old file did end up getting opened, albeit not as trivially easily as one might hope.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > but your former example is rare. While there are more exceedingly-old paper records that are still around and have been preserved than we might expect, we've lost so, so much. Paper and ink (and variations on that) are both fragile. Depends what you mean by "rare". Ancient Near Eastern correspondence isn't rare at all, precisely because they didn't use paper. (And they went to war a lot.) You seem to be writing as if that letter was a paper document, but it isn't. Paper records that old only exist in Egypt. > Digital documents are otherwise easy to preserve indefinitely, if care is taken up-front to choose a simple document format that is likely to remain parseable (or at least documented) for a long time. This isn't a good match to the example either; Ancient Near Eastern records had to be deciphered. (The Semitic ones had to be deciphered. The Sumerian ones benefited from surviving documentation, but we had to find that and learn how to read it.) The original example isn't particularly apt; reading this 30-year-old file, or a similar one, is a task that one guy can do in less than a week using existing tools and know that he's done it correctly. Reading a 4000-year-old cuneiform letter was a much larger project than that.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Until they find a storage medium that don't deteriorate through time, nope, digital storage is still worse than plain paper or clay, in losing its storage capacity and it is enough to have one bad bit.

kelnos 3y ago

I get the point you're trying to make, but your former example is rare. While there are more exceedingly-old paper records that are still around and have been preserved than we might expect, we've lost so, so much. Paper and ink (and variations on that) are both fragile. Digital documents are otherwise easy to preserve indefinitely, if care is taken up-front to choose a simple document format that is likely to remain parseable (or at least documented) for a long time. And even when you don't do that, there's always the possibility of writing a parser later (assuming documentation is around) or reverse-engineering the format. And in this case, the 30-year-old file did end up getting opened, albeit not as trivially easily as one might hope.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
> but your former example is rare. While there are more exceedingly-old paper records that are still around and have been preserved than we might expect, we've lost so, so much. Paper and ink (and variations on that) are both fragile. Depends what you mean by "rare". Ancient Near Eastern correspondence isn't rare at all, precisely because they didn't use paper. (And they went to war a lot.) You seem to be writing as if that letter was a paper document, but it isn't. Paper records that old only exist in Egypt. > Digital documents are otherwise easy to preserve indefinitely, if care is taken up-front to choose a simple document format that is likely to remain parseable (or at least documented) for a long time. This isn't a good match to the example either; Ancient Near Eastern records had to be deciphered. (The Semitic ones had to be deciphered. The Sumerian ones benefited from surviving documentation, but we had to find that and learn how to read it.) The original example isn't particularly apt; reading this 30-year-old file, or a similar one, is a task that one guy can do in less than a week using existing tools and know that he's done it correctly. Reading a 4000-year-old cuneiform letter was a much larger project than that.
pjmlp 3y ago
Until they find a storage medium that don't deteriorate through time, nope, digital storage is still worse than plain paper or clay, in losing its storage capacity and it is enough to have one bad bit.