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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2795970, member: 19463&quot;]We tend to think of antiquity as what has survived but not what was.&nbsp; I suspect there were shopping lists scratched in wax and graffiti on many surfaces but all we know are things that last 2000 years.&nbsp; I am concerned today that the 21st century will be lost compared to the 20th because so few of us have stacks of letters and diaries compared to what we might call &#039;the paper generation&#039;.&nbsp; Will the texts and tweets of today be readable in 200 years or 2000?&nbsp; I have a number of letters and books on paper that will be useful to historians trying to reconstruct the way thing were and I know there are a million other stacks of similar material.&nbsp; The posts I made online in the 1990&#039;s may or may not be considered crucial to history but the other million stacks of lost bytes might leave a gap rather like the one that makes us think of the the Romans as primarily stone carvers. </p><p><br /></p><p>Will coin collectors in 2117 have albums of Visa cards with magnetic stripes and/or chips?&nbsp; Will they figure out how to slab a bit of the Cloud?&nbsp; Will there be Lincoln cents dated 2117?&nbsp; We can only guess.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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