时间：2022-08-23 02:29:05
Remember the time capsule the late Indira Gandhi’s Congress government buried in the mid-1970s? Unfortunately, the post-Emergency general elections led to the rout of the Congress and the new government dug up the time capsule well before its scheduled opening. There have been many other time capsules in other places, including two on spacecraft that have escaped the solar system and are presumably meandering in the vast ether beyond man’s ken.
What exactly are time capsules? Well, they contain communication that informs future generations (or aliens) of the way of life of a particular community during an earlier period of history. But the problem is that they need to carry an appropriate Rosetta stone to decipher data. If we were to type out the history of the current world and collect pictures of the greatest contemporary moments on earth and confine them to a century of isolation, will the generation that finally gets to see them be able to make sense of the contents?
Not likely, especially if the contents were inscribed using current media technology. Microsoft (MS) Word is perfect for long, written documents and JPEG files eminently suitable for visual showcasing. But a hundred years hence, these will undoubtedly have become inaccessible. Come to think of it, even today, a 2007 MS Word document cannot be read on a computer that runs on older operating systems. I have often been requested for Word and Excel documents in the more compatible 1997/2003 versions. With a new MS Office slated for release shortly, you can be sure the 1997/2003 version will lose currency soon enough.
This is one of the drawbacks of the rapidly changing world of technology. With developers coming up with newer gadgets and niftier upgrades much more quickly than before, we are seeing the detritus of older machines and software turning into a mountain. Remember those six-inch floppies or the compact floppy disks on which we stored content? If I retrieved one from a time capsule, would I be able to read anything on it without recourse to specialised gadgetry? I know my efforts would be frustrated. Just as they are when I contemplate the stack of digital tapes on which I have videos captured by my Sony Handycam. Today, the only way I can see what’s on the tapes is by playing them on my now quaint Handycam. I cannot download them on my laptop (the Sony software being incompatible with Windows Vista onward). Neither can I use my old editing software (my computer no longer supports the Pinnacle editor I used). One of the most frequent requests received by Gadgets& Gizmos concerns cassettes – both audio and video. Some of the best music of a generation was stored on audio cassettes. Umpteen weddings were captured on video cassettes. Now there are almost no media players that can read either. Readers ask us how to convert the content of the cassettes to digital formats. We tell them of elaborate ways to do so. But will this help them? For the time being the compact discs on which the converted digitised contents are stored can be read by home theatre systems and audio players. But for how long? As it is, the once revolutionary CDs and DVDs are already a technology of the past. Even Blu-ray, with its more contemporary vintage, is hardly a thriving technology.
Sadly, this is how technology bites back – every time a new and better technology emerges, we, connoisseurs of the state-of-the-art, have to be prepared to lose precious data. Is there a way to preserve all our memories in the cyber attic? Unfortunately, no. There comes a time when we have to abandon our hoarding instinct. We can only choose to convert the most wanted into accessible media and hurl the rest on the mountainous pile of lifeless bits and bytes.
The writer is Executive Editor, Gadgets & Gizmos