Now I Know More (29 page)

In 1995, Pixar released the movie
Toy Story
, the tale of a room full of toys who—when real people aren't looking—turn out to be alive. Two of the toys—Woody, a cowboy, and Buzz Lightyear, an astronaut—lead the gang, both vying to be the favorite of a boy named Andy. They're joined by toy soldiers, a Slinky dog, and of course, Mr. Potato Head. The movie was a box-office smash, earning more than $360 million and warranting a sequel four years later. It too was a major success, earning another $485 million at the box office, leading to a third movie in the series. But the second film in the series almost never hit theaters, because Pixar almost accidentally deleted it.

You've probably been in the situation where something goes wrong with whatever technology you're using, and
poof!
your data is gone. Maybe you accidentally deleted a video off your phone. Perhaps you were writing a college paper and your computer crashed—without a backup. Maybe you were downloading a file and your connection timed out. Or maybe you dropped your device and it smashed, taking your photos with it. It's not hard to see how digital data can disappear despite our best efforts.

In most cases, though, major media companies don't have that problem. First of all, it's really hard to drop a huge set of servers into a toilet or onto the concrete, and second, things like massive crashes don't typically result in data deletion. But sometimes things go wrong, and in this case—for reasons unclear—a system administrator decided to run a special command (rm *, if you understand Unix commands) on one of Pixar's servers. That command quickly and thoroughly erased the drive.

Unfortunately, the drive contained a bunch of really important data for the movie—“databases containing the master copies of characters, sets, animation, etc.,” according to a computer graphics developer who was working on the project. Galyn Susman, the movie's supervising technical director, claimed that the deleted work would have required “twenty or thirty people working for a solid year” to recreate what was lost. While this might be an exaggeration, the data loss was a big deal.

But, you say, they had their backup drives. After all, this was Pixar, a major media company. They have all sorts of redundant backup systems, right? Right! So, no problem.

Except that the backups had been failing for the last month, and no one knew. It turned out that the backups were spitting out error messages, but for some reason, the error messages were being repressed (likely due to a full disk) and therefore, no one was informed that something was wrong. The last two months of work on
Toy Story 2
was gone forever.

Until Susman realized that it had also gone somewhere else—it went home with her. She was, at the time, the mother of young children and wanted to be able to work from home. This was before the era of ubiquitous broadband, so she couldn't simply connect to the servers at the office. She had to make a copy of the files she needed, which in this case contained about 70 percent of what was lost. The team was able to recover almost all their work.

Ultimately, most of this wouldn't matter. After the incident, Pixar changed the script, and while many of the character and set models Susman and her team created were kept for the newer version of the movie, all the animations and most of the lighting went down the memory hole. The story of the near-disaster, though, did live on—a version of it is included as a bonus feature on the Blu-Ray version of
Toy Story 2
.

As president, Richard Nixon wanted everything recorded for posterity—even the stuff he'd rather not anyone ever find out about. It ultimately led to his political downfall; as the Watergate scandal made headlines in 1973, the existence of his extensive recording system became public knowledge. Thousands of hours of conversations had been memorialized on tape, and there wasn't much anyone in the administration could do to prevent the public from finding out what secrets they held. But one tape is best known for what's missing—there's an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the recording. Instead of words, there are clicks, buzzes, and static.

And it's treated like a national treasure.

Tape 342—that's what the archivist community calls it—contains this eighteen-plus minutes of erased information. However, because of its potential historical significance, we haven't given up hope yet of recovering whatever was said. The recording was originally made on July 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Instead of conversation—most likely between Nixon and his then chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman—there's what appears to be static. No one knows what conversations were on those tapes—Nixon, if he knew and could remember, took that information to his grave—and the explanations for the erasures by the Nixon administration have fallen flat. In general, few scholars today assume that the erased portion of the tape contains explicit evidence of anything nefarious, but our natural human curiosity makes this mystery too juicy to ignore.

So we're not.

After Nixon left the White House, the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) took possession of the tapes, including Tape 342. Today, it's stored in conditions that
Wired
magazine noted are typically reserved for documents and recordings that actually have comprehensible words contained within them:

The reason? There's an ongoing hope that the information once recorded there will somehow be recovered. In August 2001, NARA began that rescue process in earnest, believing that advances in technology may be able to translate those buzzing noises into intelligible speech. The NARA experts began to make test tapes available to anyone with a theory as to how to translate the buzzes and noises into Nixon's words.

NARA didn't offer to pay anyone, but plenty of researchers took the bait—being the one to solve this mystery would be a reward in its own right (and probably lead to all sorts of new business opportunities). But about two years later, NARA again admitted defeat. Archivist John Carlin told the AP that he was “fully satisfied that we have explored all of the avenues to attempt to recover the sound on this tape” without success. But NARA wasn't giving up. He assured the press that NARA “will continue to preserve the tape in the hopes that later generations can try again to recover this vital piece of our history.”

As May and June approach, children around the world are doing the same thing: studying or taking end-of-year exams. Here and there, some students are celebrating, because for some reason their exams were canceled. Maybe the photocopier broke? Or the teacher was sick that day? Maybe the power was out at school?

Or maybe everything they learned was a lie.

On May 31, 1988, that's what happened in the Soviet Union.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, he ushered in a series of political reforms known as
glasnost
, or “openness,” aiming to increase transparency concerning all the things in which the government was involved. Part of the process meant allowing for the critical re-examination of what the government had done in the past, and it quickly became clear that Gorbachev's predecessors had whitewashed most of this story. The stories and lessons included in a typical Soviet history education were incomplete at best and outright propaganda at worst. The
New York Times
quoted one student who said that her textbook had only one paragraph on Joseph Stalin, and not a very good one at that: “It said simply that he was a leader who had some problems.”

So the nation needed to rewrite its history books.

But that decision was made late in the 1987–1988 school year and was not something the USSR could remedy overnight. The misunderstanding of history was pervasive across all sectors of life and had gone on for decades. As the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “even historians, social scientists and Communist Party theoreticians are uncertain what was correct, what was fantasy and what was a cover-up of crimes in the material taught Soviet students.” The USSR's State Committee on Education hoped to have new textbooks ready in time for the following school year, but that seemed optimistic.

In any event, that wouldn't help with the more immediate problem. On the last day of May, roughly 53 million schoolchildren ages six to sixteen were scheduled for their end-of-year examinations. The government had just admitted that the history section of these exams was testing the students' knowledge of exaggerations, myths, and in some cases, outright lies. Gorbachev's government wanted to reverse this trend, so the officials took dramatic action. The government ordered that the exams be canceled—a move that the government-run newspaper
Izvestia
praised as a sign that
glasnost
was real: “Perhaps this, as nothing else, testifies to the triumph of new thinking, to the readiness to discard the traditional approaches. Only yesterday, one could not even suppose that such a decision was possible, let alone would be implemented.”

But not all kids had reason to celebrate. Like many dramatic Communist orders, this one was controversial, hard to enforce, and therefore, easily ignored. As a result, many schools still administered exams in defiance of the edict—ironically, by testing their students on the now-admitted pseudo-history they had been taught over the past year.