Thoughts
What the Long Now Foundation, and a lot of archivists, miss, is that hardware just can’t survive that long.
I bet the Long Now Foundation’s clock fails in my lifetime lolol.
But more directly, there’s no battery with more than a 30 year shelf life, unused. You can’t design a computer that lasts that long.
The key, then, is that batteries are replaceable. I suspect that modular hardware and software is more maintainable and longer lasting than hardware designed to be long-lasting. Or at least, if you want to optimize for long time scales, you should optimize for repairability.
The issue of course, that you need people interested in repairing your stuff. But if people don’t care, then that’s not exactly a fault of the technology.