Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
>
Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> A well preserverd book that was printed five hundred
> years ago, can still be read today. It is doubtful
> that much of the electronic data that we have today
> will still be accessible fifty years from now.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. John Quincy Adams at the age of 10 read Smollet's 10 vol. history of England and a few other things yet apologized to his father for being lazy that summer. (From memory -- something like that.) But there aren't many of us can match J.Q. Adams, and the body of really first-rate and important material continues to grow, at an increasing rate, as literacy and population increase. It is just as with piles of stuff in your basement. After a while it is just as though much of the stuff doesn't exist because it is hidden by the rest. Similarly if you keep old magzines. And so forth. The very increase in "information" (quotes because I want to include knowledge and even wisdom as well) begins to hide itself. Some indiscriminate pruning might be a boon. I really can't bring myself to be too sad about the burning of the library at Alexandria.
Carrol