How Forbes Sent E-mails to the Future—And What Happened 20 Years Later

This article is part of a package in collaboration with Forbes on time capsules, preserving information and communicating with the future. Learn more about the report.

TThe world was different in 2005: Flip phones were cutting edge, Netflix only sent movies by mail, and kale was a side dish, not a main course. I worked for ForbesThe Forbes.com website. At the time, news sites were treated like awkward teenagers living in a basement apartment, kept at a distance from their respectable parents.

The digital media industry was new and chaotic, and new journalists like me reveled in the strangeness of the Internet and the opportunities it gave us to experiment. On the other hand, the magazines’ sales teams seemed stuck in the Mad Men era, offering tired concepts over martinis and treating online information like something you added to an offer for free, like a branded pen.

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In this context, you can imagine my lack of enthusiasm when our sales department revealed that it had sold a large advertising sponsorship to an IT infrastructure company and asked me, a telecom journalist, if I could produce a special report on the concept of “Communicate”. Fortunately, my editor at the time, Michael Noer, was equally nonplussed by the idea of ​​a dozen articles about network routers and switches.

So we decided to approach the idea of ​​”communicating” from all angles other than networking hardware. We commissioned Arthur C. Clarke to write a senior essay on how technology was actually making it harder for people to communicate. I’ve written about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and asked experts how they would craft their own messages to an extraterrestrial species. And I interviewed two dozen luminaries I’d always wanted to meet on everything I could think of: Noam Chomsky on the spontaneous invention of language; Jane Goodall on how language makes communication more difficult for primates; Stan Lee explains why words are better with pictures.

And because it was 2005, the sales team had promised their client some kind of nebulous “interactive” component of the package, so Michael I decided to approach the idea of ​​”communicating across time” by playing with the concept of a time capsule.

That was our thinking: time capsules are boring. The reason they are so often created by small town governments and elementary schools is that they are simple and harmless; they offer mundane tokens for the future. Your typical time capsule contains items that are either redundant (“Oh, great, a newspaper from 50 years ago, like I could find in the library or on the Internet”) or meaningless (“I’m sure this toy meant something to the kid who put it here, but now it’s just trash”).

So we decided to bring the concept into the 21st century: an email time capsule. We built a tool for our website that allowed users to write a message themselves and choose whether they wanted to receive it in one, three, five, 10, or 20 years. Then we opened it to the public.

It was a success. Hundreds of thousands of messages were queued, forcing us to find a way to store and send all those emails, which is harder than you think.

Here’s the problem: digital impermanence. Hard drives fail. Formats are becoming obsolete. Remember floppy disks and Zip drives? Today they might as well be cuneiform on clay tablets. How could we be sure we had a good way to not only store our emails, but also ensure they were sent on time?

Our solution was, in my opinion, both smart and elegant. We would build a program that could run on three computers owned by three different companies and residing in different locations on the Internet. Everyone would have a copy of the emails, and every couple of months each of them would ping the others and say, “Hey, I’m here.” The recipients would respond, “Yes, I’m here too.” » At the end of the first year, Instance A was sending all scheduled emails. But if instances B and C didn’t hear from this machine, instance B would send the emails, and so on.

With this type of redundancy built into the shipping process, the next problem was determining where to place the programs. Forbes was 90 years old, but in 2005 the popular belief was that print media was already dead; he just hadn’t noticed it yet. (As the current editor-in-chief of one of these zombie publications, I would like to note here that Scientific American just celebrated its 180th anniversary, and Forbes was 108 years old).

So we decided to hedge our bets by storing the data in three very different institutions: first, at Forbesthe long-standing lion of capitalism; second, at Internet giant Yahoo, which by then had become a $55 billion company after several years of rapid growth; and finally, at Codefix Consulting, a one-man consulting firm run by a college friend of mine, Garrison Hoffman.

We were hedging our bets: traditional media, flamboyant dot-coms, plucky small businesses – we figured between the three, we’d have every eventuality covered. These systems could live forever. What could go wrong?

All. Yahoo experienced layoffs in the first few months and our clever little solution never pinged. Forbes was sold to an investment group that included rock star Bono, and our plucky online editorial team was absorbed into the news team. Garrison himself sent the first year’s emails, then the third year, then the fifth year.

At the time of the 10th anniversary, I had not worked for Forbes for almost two years. I was a freelance journalist working on a book, and the email time capsule was the furthest thing from my mind. But the project survived because someone cared: a few months before the time capsule “reopened,” Garrison contacted me. We put our heads together. Codefix Consulting returned all emails.

Our best-laid plans had failed, but this new order seemed to be working just as well. Garrison and I put reminders in our now fully digital calendars, timed to alert us when another decade passed. The project seemed secure.

A little less than two years later, Garrison Hoffman died suddenly at the age of 46.

Another eight years passed. I still miss my friend. But when my calendar notification popped up a few months ago, I remembered why I loved it so much. Searching through my email inbox in mild panic, trying to figure out what to do, I found a message:

“Codefix::Time capsule is a mod_perl application designed to collect user messages, submitted via HTTP POST to a MySQL database, to be returned to the user via email on selected future dates,” it reads. “Messages are retrieved from the database and submitted to the local Mail Transport Agent (MTA) by timecapsule.cron. This script should work with any sendmail-compatible email utility and can also be configured as a backup server.”

Garrison knew and followed the best practices of his trade. He had documented his work, annotated his code, and archived the files on a server where I could find them, just in case.

I called Michael Noer, my former editor at Forbeswho was now also an old friend. We made plans for the anniversary. And as you read this, nearly 18,000 people have received an email from a different kind of old friend: their own past.

What I remember most is that technology did not save this project; human relations did it. We survived the first year and the 20th year because our friends stayed in touch. Nothing else went as planned: Yahoo, the billionaire giant, disappeared from the equation. Forbesthe old media dinosaur, has endured.

A one-man shop and one man’s dedication to his craft have proven to be the most reliable of all.

Ironically, Forbes.com’s original special report on communications is now a wreck: the images are gone, the links are broken. Digital rot is gaining. But the emails survived and opening one is profound. Whether or not those who sent them realized their 2005 dreams, they had a rare opportunity to compare their past hopes to current reality.

My own email to the future is actually quite prosaic. The subject line: “Damn, it worked.”

“Somehow you managed to get this thing to work properly,” the message continues. “Go find Michael Noer, who owes you a magnum of expensive champagne for pulling this off.”

That’s why this time machine worked: not because of servers but because of humans, because of people who cared about each other and about something they had worked together to build.