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Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Paper-based accounting was append-only, so I think the idea's always been there but was uneconomic in machine readable media for a long time.

(in particular, "new master = old master + updates" card/tape jobs were in principle append-only but —due to finite number of tapes— in practice overwriting)

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Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and reused.

A reused manuscript page is called a palimpsest and often the scraped off text can be recovered. Some of Archimedes writings actually survived this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest

Obligatory shout-out to the novella of the same name, by HN user (and, obviously, Actual Author) Charles Stross.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella)

And wax tablets, slates, etc. Pedantically, I suppose neither these nor parchment is really paper.

I don't think that was their point. If you went to a bank in the 1940s and made a withdrawal, they wouldn't pull your account slip, erase the balance, and write in the new one. They would add a new line to the ledger noting a new balance. This is by design.

Double-entry bookkeeping was a great advance.

And -- in keeping with the flow of this thread -- a complete luxury until the implements (paper/pens/tape/disk/silicon) would become abundant and ubiquitous.

Paper and ink were good enough for centuries.

Paper especially was very expensive until approximately the 19th century.

The explosive growth in the printing industry suggests otherwise.

We are simply pointing out there was a time when the surface one could write on was so precious, people used to cover previous works and re-use it instead of obtaining new ones (vellum, etc). So -- you're not wrong about the explosive growth. We're just pointing out the abundance of even writing instruments occurred at a certain point in history.

More recently, movie studios regularly destroyed old film to make space for new ones, causing old pictures, especially silent era ones, to be lost forever.

Even NASA wiped the original Apollo 11 tapes to reuse them.

This enrages me every time I see it. It's even worse with old broadcast TV, Especially daily serials/soaps. Shit is probably gone forever because the tapes were immediately wiped and reused. >:(

I know a lot of it stemmed from space and budget constraints but the complete lack of forward thinking everyone seems to have drives me bonkers.

I'm glad the Internet Archive exists. This current digital only future is terrifyingly ephemeral.

I really wish someone would give the Archive a massive, multi-billion endowment to guarantee it surviving for decades of operation with no forthcoming income.

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