Data loses its usefulness and relevance with time. Unless it's updatable, just archiving is not going to be useful. Just like how we don't find some 2000 years old writings any useful now, except for museum storage.
Pretty sure the oldest stuff I've read was around 4,500 years old (in translation, but still). Volume I of Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature.
There are a couple incomplete tales in that 3-volume work and I really wish they'd had a more stable storage medium, because now I'm stuck with accidental millennia-old cliffhangers.
You do not find 2000 years old writings useful, presumably because you have not read any, or at most some bad translations.
I find old writings extremely useful, including many of those that are 2500 years old or even older. The really useful old writings are those in bilingual editions, which allow you to skim quickly in English through passages in which you are not interested at the moment, but then allow you to read the original language to see what the author really meant. Most English translations are very bad when you have a scientific interest in the meaning of the text, because the translators are usually completely ignorant about mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, biology, technologies and so on, so they fail to translate correctly anything that includes words with special meanings in those domains.
Unfortunately, nowadays fewer people read old writings, which is obvious in the deluge of publications that claim that various new things have been discovered or invented, but those supposedly "new" things are old things that were well known decades or even centuries earlier. Worse, the "new" things usually were not only known previously, but previously better alternatives were already known which are ignored by the "inventors" of the "new" things.
It is well known, or it should be well known, that the space of solutions for many technical problems contains a finite number of alternatives, among which at a given time one is the best. However, which is the best changes in time, depending on the evolution of technologies in other domains. Over a long enough time interval, it is frequent that the optimum solution cycles through all alternatives, going back to a solution that had been preferred a long time before, but which had then been abandoned for some time.
2500 years old writings do not provide detailed solutions for present problems, e.g. how to design the schematics for the power supply of a laser. Nevertheless, they may still provide logical thinking frameworks that are as valid today as they were millennia ago, and they also show the original form of various concepts that have evolved through time until their current form. Understanding the reasons why certain things have evolved through history is essential for understanding in which direction they should be changed today.
Those who believe that we are today better in all domains in comparison with our ancestors from 2000 years ago, are delusional. I consider a few of the laws that were valid in certain ancient societies as greatly superior to the laws that have replaced them in most modern countries.
(An example is that there are now a lot of countries that claim to be "republics", not to mention a certain US party. All such claims are lies, because today there exists no republic on Earth. The principle on which the Roman Republic was grounded, and which distinguished it from other forms of government, was that, with temporary exceptions for emergencies like wars, plagues or natural calamities, no important public executive function should be occupied by a single human, but only by 2 or more humans with equal power, so that the abuse attempts of 1 of them would be stopped by the others. There are also examples in more rational and more efficient penal systems, which did not include stupid punishment methods, like prison, but where any non-irreversible kind of damage (e.g. theft, fraud, non-permanent bodily harm) was punished by a fine, but not by a fine equal to the damage, but by a fine that was a big multiple of the damage from double to 10 times, to discourage such acts.)
hulitu|6 days ago
Why do you think there is a new GTK release every couple of years ? Or a new rust compiler release every couple of months ?
b0rtb0rt|8 days ago
bubblewand|8 days ago
There are a couple incomplete tales in that 3-volume work and I really wish they'd had a more stable storage medium, because now I'm stuck with accidental millennia-old cliffhangers.
bossyTeacher|8 days ago
adrian_b|7 days ago
I find old writings extremely useful, including many of those that are 2500 years old or even older. The really useful old writings are those in bilingual editions, which allow you to skim quickly in English through passages in which you are not interested at the moment, but then allow you to read the original language to see what the author really meant. Most English translations are very bad when you have a scientific interest in the meaning of the text, because the translators are usually completely ignorant about mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, biology, technologies and so on, so they fail to translate correctly anything that includes words with special meanings in those domains.
Unfortunately, nowadays fewer people read old writings, which is obvious in the deluge of publications that claim that various new things have been discovered or invented, but those supposedly "new" things are old things that were well known decades or even centuries earlier. Worse, the "new" things usually were not only known previously, but previously better alternatives were already known which are ignored by the "inventors" of the "new" things.
It is well known, or it should be well known, that the space of solutions for many technical problems contains a finite number of alternatives, among which at a given time one is the best. However, which is the best changes in time, depending on the evolution of technologies in other domains. Over a long enough time interval, it is frequent that the optimum solution cycles through all alternatives, going back to a solution that had been preferred a long time before, but which had then been abandoned for some time.
2500 years old writings do not provide detailed solutions for present problems, e.g. how to design the schematics for the power supply of a laser. Nevertheless, they may still provide logical thinking frameworks that are as valid today as they were millennia ago, and they also show the original form of various concepts that have evolved through time until their current form. Understanding the reasons why certain things have evolved through history is essential for understanding in which direction they should be changed today.
Those who believe that we are today better in all domains in comparison with our ancestors from 2000 years ago, are delusional. I consider a few of the laws that were valid in certain ancient societies as greatly superior to the laws that have replaced them in most modern countries.
(An example is that there are now a lot of countries that claim to be "republics", not to mention a certain US party. All such claims are lies, because today there exists no republic on Earth. The principle on which the Roman Republic was grounded, and which distinguished it from other forms of government, was that, with temporary exceptions for emergencies like wars, plagues or natural calamities, no important public executive function should be occupied by a single human, but only by 2 or more humans with equal power, so that the abuse attempts of 1 of them would be stopped by the others. There are also examples in more rational and more efficient penal systems, which did not include stupid punishment methods, like prison, but where any non-irreversible kind of damage (e.g. theft, fraud, non-permanent bodily harm) was punished by a fine, but not by a fine equal to the damage, but by a fine that was a big multiple of the damage from double to 10 times, to discourage such acts.)