A data table thousands of years old (2020)

Ancient data durability vs modern storage

• Clay tablets may outlast modern digital records; fire accidentally “baked” many, preserving them for millennia.
• Some argue our own artifacts might be similarly preserved by chance; others doubt any existing electronic medium (tape, SSD, etc.) can last comparably long.
• Mention of experimental long‑lived media (e.g., glass storage) as an attempt to match clay’s durability.
• Anecdote about an old MIT AI Lab backup recovering a frozen screen buffer illustrates how random snapshots of digital life can survive by accident.

Tables, spreadsheets, and databases

• Tables are praised as a visually intuitive way to read data by rows and columns; relational databases and spreadsheets are seen as descendants of this idea.
• Discussion over whether relational schemas are inherently fixed‑length or whether variable‑length types (varchar, blob, CSV) are mainstream; some note that fixed length is an optimization, not a requirement, and that systems like SQLite store variable‑length by design.
• Historical notes: early spreadsheets (LANPAR, VisiCalc, SuperCalc, Lotus 1‑2‑3) and pre‑computer tabulation on paper.
• Debate over columnar vs object‑oriented thinking: some prefer “it’s rows and columns” simplicity; others point out event data with heterogeneous fields pushes toward JSON or NoSQL.

“Obviousness” and cognition of tabular layouts

• Thread explores a positive term for “obvious” structures like tables: suggestions include “self‑evident,” “intuitive,” “natural,” “emergent,” and several Germanic expressions meaning “lying nearby / close at hand.”
• Commenters note that 2D grids feel inevitable on a 2D medium, yet higher‑dimensional arrays appeared very late and mostly with machines.
• Observations that simple, minimal depictions (in art or layout) can be deeply “beautiful” and cognitively powerful.

History, language, and accounting context

• Tablets are linked to early administrative work in sizable ancient cities, challenging caricatures of purely survival‑focused ancient life.
• Disagreement over ancient mortality: some emphasize child death skewing averages; others dispute extremely low adult life expectancy claims.
• Accounting discussion: tablets seen as early tabulated tallies; double‑entry bookkeeping is much later but also inherently tabular.
• Etymological note: “table” and “tablet” share a root as flat surfaces for laying out data.

Modern echoes, projects, and humor

• References to historically important tables (e.g., Alfonsine tables) and modern tooling influenced by tabular thinking (Great Tables, DuckDB talks).
• Personal projects to encode long‑lasting information on clay or metal (including aluminum foil in an urn) explicitly mimic Babylonian durability.
• Numerous jokes: “Excel is in our DNA” (and genes misparsed as dates), inevitable “all software becomes Excel,” alien/time‑traveler origins of spreadsheets, and “Excel ‑2k” macro humor.