this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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The Internet in Ancient Times

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Welcome to the stone age... or the bronze age... or the iron age... heck, anything with an 'age' is welcome, except our modern age or any ages to come.

This is about what the internet was like thousands of years ago back when it all started. Like when Darius the Great hired mercenaries via Craigslist or when Egypt invented emojis.

CODE OF LAWS

1 - Be civil. No name calling, no fighting, keep your flint hand axes inside your leather pouches at all times.

2 - Keep the AI stuff to a minimum. It gets annoying and old fashioned memes are more fun for everyone.

3 - None of this newfangled modern 21st century nonsense. We don't even know what "21st century" means.

4 - No porn/explicit content. The king is sensitive about these things.

5 - No lemmy.world TOS violations will be tolerated. So there.

6 - There is no ~~rule~~ law 6.

Laws of justice which Hammurabi, the wise king, established. A righteous law, and pious statute did he teach the land. Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. I have not withdrawn myself from the men, whom Bel gave to me, the rule over whom Marduk gave to me, I was not negligent, but I made them a peaceful abiding-place. I expounded all great difficulties, I made the light shine upon them. With the mighty weapons which Zamama and Ishtar entrusted to me, with the keen vision with which Ea endowed me, with the wisdom that Marduk gave me, I have uprooted the enemy above and below (in north and south), subdued the earth, brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness.

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Also, she might say she's all that, but she ain't.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's honestly astounding how many cuneiform tablets (and fragments of tablets) we have. Multiple ancient libraries full of tablets have been excavated. Now cuneiform was just a system of writing like our Latin alphabet, so they are in all sorts of languages, but we know so much more about those cultures than others of the time because they were writing on clay, then they baked the clay. That makes it last.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancient_world#Ancient_Near_East

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It makes me wonder if in a thousand years anything written on any hard drive will be rescuable?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

Absolutely not.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 weeks ago

They won't. There is some research into long term data storage, though. DNA can be recoverable for almost geological time periods without any special facility providing an optimal environment. There is some work on encoding information directly to DNA.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago

No. I plugged in a Quantum Fireball drive (~1997, about 9 GB), (IDE to SATA3) bridge and tried to extract the data from it.

The drive platter promptly crashed into the head, the platter shattered, and then a full short began drawing maximum amperage and melting the IDE slot.

So the platter blew up and the drive caught (indirect) fire.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe we should CNC in copper sheets at least the simple language wikipedia?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If this interests you, sci-fi author and astrophysicist Gregory Benford did a deep dive into the subject some years back after being put on a committee to try to decide how to mark a nuclear waste storage site as unsafe even if humanity collapses and written language is forgotten.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2014020.Deep_Time

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

This is not a place of honor

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think there’s a huge difference between a knowledge repository and a nuclear waste storage facility immediacy is a major factor here as well as the sample size of writing

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

That's only part of the book.