Hard facts

http://www.james-marsh.co.uk/source/102.html


I'd allow as how maybe prostitutes were the first professionals, but surely bean counters were not too far behind. Just think back to the Old Testament, and one of the first things you find out is all the "begats", detailing who was who was whose. And why was Jesus born in Bethlehem? Because his parents had to go there to "be enrolled" -- counted. And when jolly old England got conquered by William the, well, Counquerer, the first thing he did was send out the bean counters to tally his spoils. They came up with an inventory that came to be known as the "Doomsday Book". (See, http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/)

Subsequently, any attempt by historians in the making of history to gather and record all the affairs of any particular age has been referred to as a Doomsday collection. There was a fascinating case study of one such project that gathered and digitised a whole heap of such stuff in the 1980's. "In 1986, on the 900th anniversary of the original archive book, the corporation spent £2.5 million to create a computer-based, multimedia version - a snapshot of Britain in the mid-1980s stored on two interactive video discs."

"Cool", I hear you say. (Nobody says "cool" better than Wayne.) Yeah, but: after a few years the software that was needed to read and play the discs got upgraded to the point where the discs were unreadable and all that information was doomed. http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/lessons-of-the-domesday-project/2005/09/22/1126982184212.html

So, here we have, one the one hand, ancient histories safely locked away on scrolls, tablets, clay pots, old books, but new history becoming obsolete nearly as fast as it is recorded. Tis a marvelously ironic world we live in.

There is "a growing number of computer experts worldwide who believe that, far from a panacea that provides increasingly efficient answers to problems of recording, storing and retrieving information, technology is deeply flawed.
They fear that rather than ushering mankind into a techno-utopia of paperless offices and clean, eco-friendly, endlessly flexible, virtual communication, it threatens to cast future generations into what Connell describes as a "digital dark age". "It all seems very attractive - scanning documents, taking pictures, putting them into the computer for safekeeping, allowing us to throw away hard copies and to save space." Indeed, it is the most dramatic record-keeping revolution since the invention of printing." http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/the-digital-dark-age/2005/09/22/1126982184206.html

And what advice do these experts offer? "... until the "cavalry arrives", as a fellow curator once put it - his advice is simple: keep a hard copy. Or, assuming it's not already too late, make one." (Id.)

Now, if we accept the ephemeral-ness of digital data and the need to back it up, what kind of case could all those wronged writers have against ...... http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/09/21/googleprint/index.php