In 1983, when he was 28, Steve Jobs buried a 13-foot-long time capsule packed with personal items after a tech conference in Aspen Colorado. Its discovery and unearthing a few days ago was filmed for the National Geographic Channel‘s reality show ‘Digger’.
Although it seems most of its eclectic mix of items haven’t yet been catalogued, it includes a bunch of little cards that say “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be” which was the conference title, an eight-track tape of The Moody Blues, a Sears Roebuck catalog, a Rubik’s Cube, a then-new mouse for the Lisa computer, one of the first commercial mice ever sold, and a six-pack of beer, meant as a reward for the crew that would dig it up.
We imagine that Jobs figured it would be dug up much farther into the future. It also made us think about the idea of creating our own time capsule, our personal collection meant to show this very moment to someone in the future. Andy Warhol made a practice of making time capsules, by dropping everyday things into cardboard boxes, which he stored in New Jersey — all 600+ of them.
We’re thinking ‘improvised life’ will be something of a time capsule, like many other blogs and websites out there, it its kept alive after we go (OMG we need to think about that!). And of course, our age has been deeply catalogued by digital images. (We already have a digital memory archive.)
It’s got us mulling: what tangible items, images, music would we include in ours? What describes right now?
via DesignBoom
Related posts: sagan’s mixtape of the human experience – for aliens
andy warhol’s time capsules
‘the last pictures’: what would you send into space?
‘shelf of stuff’: what’s on yours?
digital memory archive (photograph stuff then give it away)
