NEW YORK -- MIT's business school froze the Internet in time Thursday in a digital time capsule that will be opened in only five years -- an eternity in Net years.
The Sloan School of Management's time capsule includes predictions by United Nations Secretary-General and Sloan alumnus Kofi Annan, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Timothy Berners-Lee, creator of the Web and professor at MIT, and business mogul Martha Stewart.
The digital archeological dig is electronically sealed, but visitors to the MIT site can get a sneak peek. The capsule, which will be opened in 2004, contains a "complicated and exciting tapestry of contents that may not seem like they belong together but, in their totality, actually fit well with one another," read a statement.
These include:
- An online guide that helps parents talk to their kids about the impeachment of President Clinton, along with an audio clip of his Senate impeachment trial, as played over a local radio station's Web site.
- A snapshot of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's 28 January Senate testimony on the Net-stock mania, along with portions of Web pages and news accounts of the seemingly unrelenting wave of Internet deals.
- A page from online auction house eBay and cyberspace offerings from more traditional retailers such as Spiegel and Victoria's Secret. The latter hosted a much-ballyhooed webcast of a lingerie fashion show.
- Women-oriented sites such as Advancing Women, a service designed to help working women, and Women-Connect-Asia, an online network for women living and working in Asia.
Real-world time capsules -- the kind that get buried in cornerstones or the ground amid solemn ceremony -- are usually meant to be opened after 25, 50, 100 years, or more.
But five?
"It will seem like an eternity in cyberspace," Mary Schaefer, a spokeswoman for Sloan, said in a telephone interview, referring to the blisteringly fast pace of developments on the Internet. "It is 25 Net years." The time capsule will be sealed with encryption, making it unreadable to anyone without the keys -- a pass phrase and algorithm. Those keys are held by the Sloan School dean, Richard Schmalensee.
And what would happen if, say, the dean were run over by a truck? Would the time capsule remain sealed in digital perpetuity? "We'll have a spare, and I can't tell you where that is," said Schaefer.
The time capsule could also prove a tempting target for hackers eager to show their mettle by cracking it open before 2004.
"In terms of where we're storing it, we're trying to control the access," Schaefer said. "But this is MIT. We don't manage the creativity here."
The idea for the time capsule came from The Jelly, a startup Internet media-relations company and one of Sloan School's business partners. Suggestions for what should go into the capsule came from scores of Sloan alumni, faculty, students, staff, and friends of the school from around the world. A team of students, faculty, and staff determined the final cut.
