Millennial parties don't happen that often, at least not on the usual human scale of time.

So, I took it upon myself to importune my colleagues and friends, prior to the y2k party, held on December 31st, 1999, by asking them to send me tidbits they would like to include in a digital time capsule. The first observation to be made is that only a handful responded although well over a hundred showed up for the party. Whether that reflects a belief that we have nothing of lasting import, that there are better things to do than worry about a message to the future, or just general well-being is a question I leave to the reader.

This time capsule comes in two forms, one open to read as normal text files and the other is a digitally signed (using my PGP public key which you can also get from the PGP certificate server under linked to my isaac_kohane@harvard.edu) zipped file of all the contents of the time capsule. Feel free to copy any or all of the capsule to your own storage media; it'll only increase the probability of the capsule making it to the next millennium.

 

 

 

Contents:

The party invitation.

A quicktime movie of the entire party taken on a low-resolution time-lapsed webcam. At the time, the whole party was broadcast to all our friends around the world. Surprisingly, there were over 3000 visits to the website during the course of the party. Because of the size (15+ megabytes) of this movie, it is not included in the time capsule.

  • From Robert Thau, early builds of the influential Apache web server (in the development of which he played an important role) and a paper by Alan Turning.
  • Zak's y2k note.