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5000 year-old Cuneiform tablets Go Digital
purduephotog writes "In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world to rapidly plundered historical texts, a joint project between the University of California and the Max Planck Institute have photographed and digitized around 60,000 tablets. An overview is available at ABCNews, while the main site can be found at at UCLA." The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/ be usable longer then the clay tablets.
...than the clay tablets.
My thingy is bigger than your thingy.
First we'll have lunch, then we'll storm the embassy.
> what are the odds that in 4 millenia we'll still have the digital versions in a readable format?
The odds of still having readable punched cards are practically zero. However, this is a tired argument that is repeated far too often. The difference between punched cards and clay tablets is that one medium is (easily) machine readable, while the other isn't. Once information is present in machine readable form, its transfer between various media is something that can be highly automated and done in a reasonable amount of time. No monks and centuries of transcription required there.
Even in the case of punched cards, the information can be transfered onto more modern media (e.g. hard drives) in a very reasonable amount of time with a very reasonable amount of effort. With newer media, the effort becomes even more trivial. Once you have the entire Library of Congress on hard drives, the process of transferring their contents to (fewer and fewer) drives (or whatever new technology arrives) every ten years or so can easily become a routine process. You'd like a copy of the LOC? Sure, just pop your holographic crystal into the slot and hit Go.