2013 or 1000 BC?

[cthulu2016]

People of this era recorded business information, like inventories, by pressing a stylus against a tablet of a type that would "remember" those marks to be referenced later

[dawg]

1. iOS7 blows cuneiform completely out of the water.

It's all about the apps.

[MineralMan]

2. Hmm...I'm not so sure about that.

I have a Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet from sometime in BCE. How many iPads will still be functional in 3000 years, I wonder? I showed my tablet to a person who studies such things, and he translated part of it for me. It's still readable, after all those years.

Hell, if your iPad battery fails, you just throw the whole thing away and get the latest model.

[dawg]

3. If you really have that ...

I am soooooooooooooooooooooo jealous!

I'm still using my first edition iPad. It pretty much works the same as it did straight out of the box in 2010. I don't like my chances of it lasting another 2996 years though.

But on the other hand, can a clay tablet play Angry Birds?

[MineralMan]

4. I do. I acquired it when I purchased a collection of minerals from the

estate of a collector I knew very well. I had been helping him with cataloging, etc., and he told his family to give me first shot at buying the collection when he died. The cuneiform tablet, along with some letters from an archaeologist friend of his who had collected it at the actual site was included in the collection.

It's a prized possession of mine. Surprisingly, such tablets are not all that rare, and not all that costly to purchase. Of course, values are relative, so it might seem costly.

I don't play Angry Birds, anyhow, so that wouldn't matter to me, I guess.

[SheilaT]

5. While the current technology can be wonderful in many ways,

the fact that it will degrade more quickly than people realize is actually scary.

One of the reasons I tend to get so riled up when people start making broad claims about books made of paper will stop being made any more, is that those books can easily last hundreds of years. Every time they tweak the technology, a bunch of the digital stuff gets lost. I am constantly frustrated by losing old files in older word processing programs because of a lack of backward compatibility. I'm also waiting for the day when the Kindle, Nook, and all those other people make a change so that if you want to upgrade your reader, none of what you currently have loaded will transfer to the new one. Perhaps I'm totally wrong in this case and that will never happen.