I did toy with the idea of including that in my original snark but that’s the point I’m making.
We are talking about an expected liftime on the order of 70-90 years for the healthy and lucky ones.
Discounting singularity-based, anti-senesance technology from our considerations we really are talking a quite short time scale. Actual, mass market, currently extant punch card readers are creeping up on being 70 years old now (I think) and haven’t crumbled into dust.
Fair enough, they are museum pieces but the concepts of their function aren’t going anywhere and are we really taking the total collapse of society as a consideration?
Why wouldn’t they be able to leave a bunch of the machines in storage with the files, with (if you really want) printed English instructions on how to build replacements?
But really, all this contortion is for one simple assumption. That you want this data to be stored digitally.
I dunno, maybe you want to encrypt it or compress it or something.
I just think the use of English printed in ink on the paper is a deliberate attempt to be archaic in the face of a challenging set of digital solutions.
