Last month, UW-Madison researcher Richard Bonomo found himself in need of a Betamax player.
This might seem a strange equipment need for someone who works in the UW Fusion Technology Institute, where scientists are attempting to achieve nuclear fusion, which one day may prove essential to serving the clean energy needs of future generations.
But Bonomo recently came across a forgotten cache of tapes containing research data on the mining of lunar helium 3 — a non-radioactive isotope used in advanced fusion reactions that’s rare on earth but abundant on the moon.
“I wanted to digitize it before it became impossible to do so,” Bonomo says.
Like other forms of magnetic storage media, Betamax tapes have a relatively short lifespan, lasting only a few decades before they deteriorate.
The problem is, who the heck has a Betamax player anymore? Outdated and obscure, the technology was all but vanquished by VHS after an intense video formatting war in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Rather than trying his luck at the local scrap yard, Bonomo turned to the UW TechPartners email list to see if any of its 1,000 or so members could help him out. Turns out a few technophiles had Betamax players lying around. Somebody even offered up an ancient U-matic (an analog recording videocassette format from the late 1960s).
“These machines are disappearing very fast,” Bonomo says. In the meantime, data formats continue to progress, and the amount of data continues to increase.
Do Bonomo’s Betamax tapes hold the secrets to lunar helium 3 mining that will help usher in a glorious new era of post-fossil fuel peace and prosperity? That remains to be seen. But thanks to the technology community at UW, the information he found will survive and benefit future generations.
At a research institution the size of the UW, there’s a “staggering” amount of information in need of a digital archiving upgrade, says Dorothea Salo, a faculty associate in the UW School of Library and Information Studies. If people don’t act fast, many of the records will be lost forever to the garbage pile.
“The thing about old media is, it’s sometimes impossible to get your hands on playback equipment,” she says. “It’s a huge and growing problem.”
And it isn’t just an academic problem — think of all the irreplaceable home movies and dusty boxes of precious photographs stored in attics and garages across the world.
Google vice president Vint Cerf has recently sounded the alarm about this exact problem, warning of a “forgotten generation” brought on by “bit rot,” or the gradual, inevitable obsolescence of technology.
Luckily, Salo is working on a solution: She and her students have created a Rube Goldberg-type apparatus to help people save their outdated media by transitioning them into modern formats.
The contraption, known as Recovering Analog and Digital Data (RADD for short), is tucked away in a back corner of the SLIS library in Helen C. White Hall.
Made up of salvaged and recycled equipment, it looks a bit like a technological Frankenstein’s monster — it can play vinyl records, VHS and cassette tape; scan books; and read 3 ½-inch floppy disks (although the older ones get persnickety), 100MB ZIP discs, memory cards and 35mm film slides.
Soon, Salo hopes to add a reel-to-reel tape machine, a 250MB ZIP drive, a SyQuest Jaz drive and an 8-inch floppy drive.
“This is the work that 21st century librarians do,” she says.
There’s a certain nostalgia that comes from interacting with old technology, and in many ways RADD is a friendly reminder of memories and experiences from bygone eras.
“People regret throwing away their [tech] garbage,” says Eric Schatzberg, a UW history of science professor. Vinyl LPs are back in vogue, high-end audiophiles covet tube amplifiers, and dirigibles may be making a comeback.
But at the same time, lots of today’s technology still gets thrown away. People who swear that modern machines just don’t hold up as well as older models aren’t making it up — as equipment gets more advanced, it often gets cheaper and harder to take apart and fix, Schatzberg says. As a result, people now more often replace their technology instead of repairing it.
“We’re alienated from technology in the sense that it’s unfamiliar to us,” Schatzberg says. “We don’t open things up and take them apart anymore.”
At the intersection of technology’s ubiquitousness and the design concept of “planned obsolescence” lies an odd paradox: Our relationship with tech is increasingly intimate, but our understanding of it is increasingly superficial. It’s the reason we don’t mourn a broken cell phone the same way we do a broken-down classic car.
But even as devices seemingly fade into obscurity, old technologies never truly die: They serve as building blocks for future iterations.
“It’s important to remember that technology has been around even before the human species,” Schatzberg says. “Early hominids had stone tools. It’s an essential part of what makes us human, but it’s also always been changing — sometimes slowly and sometimes more quickly.”