Re: Hmm ...
It's often said, but you have to consider the duplication of stuff. That company's old records were still in the storeroom, but that only worked because the company made the choice to preserve old records as many other companies did not.
The company still existed. If it had gone bankrupt in the 1960s, those papers wouldn't have been kept around unless the owner was very sentimental. Meanwhile, I can find lots of data on more recent companies even decades after they've stopped existing. I have some code here that was written in the early 80s (not open source stuff) by a company that stopped existing in the 90s. I did not work there. I got this stuff in 2020. Digital data allowed that to happen. If I can get it to run well on modern hardware, which isn't looking promising but it's one of my hobbies, it will stay around on my storage and likely be passed on.
The company didn't throw out their paper. If they even moved buildings, it's relatively likely they'd discard the old paper. I'm guessing that, when you wrote about it, the building was quite old and they'd been there a long time. It's easy to copy a backup tape and to send it elsewhere. Physical storage of a tape is cheap and so is rental of someone else's drives. It is harder to move paper records to another town, storing them can take a lot of space and therefore expense, and for records of purely historical interest, many people won't bother.
Digital records will indeed be a problem for archeologists if we have a global cataclysmic event that creates a gulf of time, but such events are very rare. A lot of records that are currently used did not survive such events to be unearthed, but were discovered in more mundane locations. We need not despair just yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
