[ih] archival quality, was Internet-history Digest

[John Levine]

It appears that Marc Weber via Internet-history <marc at webhistory.org> said:
>As to which media outlast others, it’s interesting that most new media are more ephemeral than the ones that came before.... Clay
>tablets were so durable they baked hard in fires. Paper is more fragile but can still last millennia. ...

I think we have survivor bias here -- the only records we have from a
thousand years ago are the ones that happened to be on media that last
a thousand years. I expect there were plenty of things written on
badly tanned vellum which rotted away, using organic inks that flaked
and faded to illegibility.

I do agree that we have a profusion of the high tech equvalent of badly 
tanned vellum these days.

R's,
John